Augustus Pitt Rivers Biography

Augustus Pitt Rivers was an English army officer and archaeologist, often called the “father of British archaeology”. He played a major role in the progress of archaeology and ethnology and is credited to have introduced several innovations in archeological methodology. He also brought about notable changes in the manner of displaying archaeological and ethnological collections. Born in a wealthy family in Yorkshire, he chose to pursue a career in the army when he grew up. He enrolled in the Royal Military College at Sandhurst but stayed there only for a very short time. He was commissioned into the Grenadier Guards as an ensign and this marked the beginning of his long and successful career as a military man. Over the course of his military career he developed an interest in ethnology and archaeology during his overseas postings. He was deeply influenced by the evolutionary writings of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, and went on to develop the idea of typology, i.e. the classification of artefacts in a chronological sequence. As luck would have it, he inherited vast estates which contained many archaeological sites and following his retirement from the army, he embarked on a series of excavations of prehistoric, Roman, and Saxon sites on the estates. He was very meticulous in his work and is considered to be the first scientific archaeologist to work in Britain