Development of archaeological method

Artifacts discovered at the 1808 Bush Barrow excavation by Sir Richard Colt Hoar
e and William Cunnington.
The father of archaeological excavation was William Cunnington (1754 1810). He und
ertook excavations in Wiltshire from around 1798,[8] funded by Sir Richard Colt
Hoare. Cunnington made meticulous recordings of neolithic and Bronze Age barrows
, and the terms he used to categorize and describe them are still used by archae
ologists today.[9]
One of the major achievements of 19th century archaeology was the development of
stratigraphy. The idea of overlapping strata tracing back to successive periods
was borrowed from the new geological and paleontological work of scholars like
William Smith, James Hutton and Charles Lyell. The application of stratigraphy t
o archaeology first took place with the excavations of prehistorical and Bronze
Age sites. In the third and fourth decades of the 19th century, archaeologists l
ike Jacques Boucher de Perthes and Christian Jrgensen Thomsen began to put the ar
tifacts they had found in chronological order.
A major figure in the development of archaeology into a rigorous science was the
army officer and ethnologist, Augustus Pitt Rivers,[10] who began excavations o
n his land in England in the 1880s. His approach was highly methodical by the st
andards of the time, and he is widely regarded as the first scientific archaeolo
gist. He arranged his artifacts by type or "typologically, and within types by d
ate or "chronologically". This style of arrangement, designed to highlight the e
volutionary trends in human artifacts, was of enormous significance for the accu
rate dating of the objects. His most important methodological innovation was his
insistence that all artifacts, not just beautiful or unique ones, be collected
and catalogued.[11]