At Home - Bill Bryson [236]
He was capable of the most sudden and disproportionate violence. After banishing one of his sons from the estate for some untold infraction, he forbade his other children to have any contact with him. But one daughter, Alice, took pity on her brother and met him at the estate edge to pass him some money. Learning of this, Pitt Rivers intercepted Alice as she returned to the house and beat her to the ground with her own riding crop.*
For all his personal shortcomings, Pitt Rivers was an outstanding archaeologist—indeed, was one of the fathers of modern archaeology. He brought method and rigor to the field. He carefully labeled shards of pottery and other fragments at a time when that was not routinely done. The idea of organizing archaeological finds into a systematic sequence—a process known as typology—was his invention. Unusually, he was less interested in glittering treasure than in the objects of everyday life—beakers, combs, decorative beads, and the like—which had mostly gone undervalued theretofore. He also brought to archaeology a devotion to precision. He invented a device called a craniometer, which could make very exact measurements of human skulls. After his death, his collection of artifacts formed the foundation of the great Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford.
Thanks in large part to Pitt Rivers’s exacting methodology, by the second half of the nineteenth century archaeology was becoming more like a science and less like a treasure hunt, and the more careless excesses of the early antiquaries were becoming a thing of the past. In the wider world, however, destruction was getting worse. Practically all the ancient monuments in Britain were in private hands, and no law compelled owners to look after them. Stories abounded of people destroying artifacts, either because they found them a nuisance or failed to appreciate their rarity. In Orkney, a farmer at Stenness, not far from Skara Brae, demolished a prehistoric megalith known as the Stone of Odin because it was in his way when he plowed. He was about to start in on the now-famous Stones of Stenness when horrified islanders persuaded him to desist.
Even something as peerless as Stonehenge was astoundingly insecure. Visitors commonly carved their names in the stones or chipped off pieces to take away as souvenirs. One man was found banging away on a sarsen with a sledgehammer. In 1883, the London and South-Western Railway announced plans to run a line through the heart of the Stonehenge site. When people complained, a railway official countered that Stonehenge was “entirely out of repair, and not the slightest use to anyone now.”
Clearly, Britain’s ancient heritage needed a savior. Enter one of the most extraordinary fellows of that extraordinary age. His name was John Lubbock, and it is remarkable that he is not better known. It would be hard to name any figure who did more useful things in more fields and won less lasting fame for it.
The son of a wealthy banker, Lubbock grew up as a neighbor of Charles Darwin in Kent. He played with Darwin’s children and was constantly in and out of the Darwin house. He had a gift for natural history, which endeared him to the great man. The two spent many hours together in Darwin’s study looking at specimens in matching microscopes. At one point when Darwin was depressed, young Lubbock was the only visitor he would receive.
Upon reaching adulthood, Lubbock followed his father into banking, but his heart was in science. He was a tireless, if slightly eccentric, experimenter. Once he spent three months trying to teach his dog to read. Developing an interest in archaeology, he learned Danish because Denmark was then the world leader in the field. His particular interest in insects led him to keep a colony of bees in his sitting room, the better