'An army officer for most of his life, Pitt-Rivers retired from the military in 1882 and in the following year embarked on a series of excavations of prehistoric, Roman, and Saxon sites on his 29,000-acre estate in Wiltshire. His large-scale excavations, models of organization and painstaking care, unearthed villages, camps, cemeteries, and barrows (burial mounds) at sites such as Woodcutts, Rotherley, South Lodge, Bokerly Dyke, and Wansdyke.
'His efforts resulted in one of the classics of archaeology, the richly illustrated Excavations in Cranborne Chase, 5 vol. (1887–1903), which Pitt-Rivers printed privately. He also observed a similarity between the stone implements used in Europe when certain rhinoceroses and mammoths roamed there and the implements characteristic of the dawning stages of Egyptian culture.'
Antique Works of Art from Benin (1900) is another book on which he is listed as the author.
Pitt-Rivers' The Evolution of Culture: And Other Essays, (1906) includes this detail:
'Some animals, ...are.... armed [with]... their defences on the most vulnerable part, as the mane of the lion,...[while the] skin of the tiger is of so tough and yielding a nature, as to resist the horn of the buffalo when driven with full force against its sides.....'
Augustus Pitt-Rivers defined and improved standards within ethnology and archeology. He "stressed the need for total excavation of sites, thorough stratigraphic observation and recording, and prompt and complete publication. Like Sir Flinders Petrie....[he] adopted a sociological approach to the study of excavated objects and emphasized the instructional value of common artifacts." (Britannica.)
And we read elsewhere that his collections later were the basis of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford and The Salisbury Museum in Wiltshire.
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