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Journal of the T. E. Lawrence Society 
ISSN 0963-1747

Vol. I, No. 1, Spring 1991

Edited by Jeremy Wilson

Lawrence as archaeologist

Rupert Chapman:

I.  The beginning
 

Lawrence's first real interest, beginning by at least the age of fourteen, was history and archaeology.¹ It is hardly surprising that, living in Oxford, he took an early interest in medieval remains.¹ This may also reflect the influence of the Pre-Raphaelite movement and the arts and crafts movement, as well as the general atmosphere of the romantic revival in the nineteenth century. During his convalescence after a broken leg in the autumn and winter of 1904 he spent time reading history and archaeology, including two books on Layard's excavations at Nineveh, which apparently he virtually memorised.¹ The accounts of Lawrence's friend of this time, C. F. C. Beeson, speak of Lawrence's interest as a `passionate absorption'.¹ Lawrence was fortunate to have the sympathetic guidance of C. F. Bell of the Ashmolean Museum during this period and, thus supported and encouraged, what might have been merely a passing phase grew into a lifelong interest.

The problem addressed by this paper is the assessment of Lawrence as archaeologist. This is not an easy task. Any such assessment is necessarily flawed. In the first place, it is not possible to assess  the work of Lawrence without being influenced by his later fame. As may be seen from the various biographies, this tends to result in either strongly pro- or anti-Lawrence views. In addition, the only  purely archaeological work produced by Lawrence on his own was Crusader Castles. His contribution to the Wilderness of Zin survey was joint with Woolley, as was his work at Carchemish, published years after the event by Woolley, who had, by that time, developed a marked antipathy to Lawrence.² What follows is, therefore, little more than a set of personal impressions and pure speculation, insofar as it attempts to assess what might have been, had Lawrence, like Woolley,  been left to pursue a career in archaeology.

II.  The background: archaeology at the turn of the century

In order to make a reasonable assessment of Lawrence as archaeologist we must first have a standard by which to judge him. This means that we must understand something of the archaeology of Lawrence's contemporaries. Modern archaeology emerged from antiquarianism in the course of the nineteenth century. The first steps were taken in Scandinavia. In about 1816 C. J. Thomsen, curator of the national museum in Copenhagen, recognised that certain artefact types consistently appeared in association with one another in the groups of antiquities discovered in his country. Just as importantly, certain types of finds rarely, or even never, occurred together. Thomsen found that by using these associations he could build up a sequence of artefact types. This allowed him to resolve a problem which had long bedevilled scholars attempting to study the antiquities of the territories which lay beyond the boundaries of the Roman empire; or indeed those interested in the pre-Roman antiquities of the territories which had lain within it, namely, that in the absence of information in the written record there was no means of dating their finds, and therefore no means of  learning anything of the people who made and used them. Once it was possible to place the groups of finds from excavated sites in their correct relative chronological order, it was possible to examine the complexes of artefacts in use at any one time, to look at the houses, farms, graves, temples, etc., of any group of people. It was also possible to examine the way in which particular societies changed through time and, of course, to begin to discuss the question of why it was that they changed, and why they changed in one way rather than another.

This marked a major break with the antiquarianism which had long been developing in the countries of western Europe. Hitherto, the antiquaries had accepted the written records which came down to them as essentially complete. The antiquities they found were understood in terms of the information contained in these records; the problem confronting them was merely one of ascertaining which of the ancient societies mentioned in the texts had produced the specific artefacts in question. No new information had been derived from the artefacts themselves, and no new synthesis was, or could be, produced.³ In the course of the nineteenth century this new paradigm spread from Scandinavia  through the whole of Europe and North America.

In different regions, archaeology took different directions in the course of the nineteenth century. In Britain, the main thrust has been described as evolutionary archaeology.⁴ Its conceptual framework was the idea of progress, of the advance of humanity from primitive savagery, through barbarism, to civilisation. It was assumed that this was a unilineal sequence through which the whole of humanity had passed or would pass (in the case of those contemporary societies which were still classed in the stages of savagery or barbarism). Of course, where the culture being studied had left written records the situation was different. This has come to be known as historical archaeology, and it is the area in which Lawrence was interested, both in his early collecting of medieval antiquities in Oxford and in his later work in the Near East. In this field, also, the paradigm shift initiated by C. J. Thomsen had had its effect in the course of the century. By the time Lawrence began to take an interest in archaeology, excavations were being used not simply in the time-honoured antiquarian fashion - to provide illustrations for the written record or as a background in which to set the synthesis derived from that record - but as a source of new facts, logically independent of the written record.

Historical archaeology began in the Near East early in the nineteenth century with the work of Paul Emile Botta in 1842 and, a few years later, of Austin Henry Layard. With the decipherment of cuneiform in the middle of the century a series of ancient civilisations was revealed, and scholars of several nationalities rushed to begin the archaeological investigation of these cultures. As Karl Popper has pointed out, a new paradigm replaces an older one by exceeding it, but includes the older paradigm as a special case. So archaeology includes antiquarianism. In the case of the archaeology of Egypt (apart from the work of Sir Flinders Petrie) and Mesopotamia, this took the  form of a search for art objects and texts. Nevertheless, the scholars concerned, like the prehistorians, sought for and found new information in the archaeological evidence, independent of the written record. The breakthrough into modern archaeology in the Levant, where Lawrence worked, came in 1890, with the excavations of Flinders Petrie (later Professor Sir Flinders Petrie) at Tell el Hesy in what is today Israel. In this excavation, Petrie corroborated the work of Schliemann who was the first to demonstrate that the mounds, or 'tells', which dotted the landscape of the Near East, contained the superimposed remains of successive ancient cities. By introducing the study of the evolution of ceramic types to the Near East, he provided a means for placing the remains found in the levels of different sites in the correct chronological position relative to one another. Between 1890 and 1914 a series of excavations was carried out in Palestine by scholars working for the Palestine Exploration Fund and the Deutsche Palestina Verein. In north Syria, the area of Carchemish, no proper archaeological excavations had been carried out prior to the British Museum expedition.


III.  Lawrence's work

Lawrence's early collection and study of medieval antiquities can only be called antiquarian. This is not a criticism: his interest was clearly serious, and his contribution valuable in the accumulation of facts concerning the archaeology of the Oxford area. The first point which I would make in assessing Lawrence as archaeologist is that he very quickly transcended the limitations of antiquarianism. This is hardly surprising in someone who clearly had a quick and lively mind; indeed, it would have been rather more surprising had he not done so. By the time he entered Oxford University this shift had taken place, and his interest had centred on the problems of the history of medieval European military architecture.⁵ From 1906 and his first cycle tour of France, Lawrence devoted himself to extensive study of the military remains. The problem which finally formed the basis for his thesis, the relation between Near Eastern military architecture (Byzantine and Islamic) and the military architecture of western Europe does not appear to have entered his thinking until quite late in the process of his research,⁶ an occurrence not unknown to others engaged in their first research project.

When Lawrence began his study of Crusader castles, the medieval military architecture of France and Britain - his basis for comparison with the castles of the Crusaders in the east - was already well known. This was hardly true of the castles in the east. The problem which he set out to resolve - the relation between the military architecture of western Europe and that of the Near East during and after the period of the Crusades - had been tackled before, as witness the authors against whose points of view Lawrence was to argue. Those who had written on the subject had, however, done so with little reliable published information on the castles of the east, and less personal experience of them. Lawrence's careful, detailed study of these structures was, therefore, a substantial contribution in itself.

The great authority on castles in Lawrence's day was Sir Charles Oman, who argued that the military architecture of the Crusaders was strongly influenced by the military architecture of the Byzantine empire. Lawrence argued strongly against this point of view, holding that the developments visible within the sequence of Crusader castles in the east are independent of Byzantine influence and, indeed, that the Crusader castles in the east had relatively little influence on the independent  development of fortifications in the west. In his recent reconsideration of Lawrence's work, Pringle indentifies two major problems. The first of these is that both Oman and Lawrence appear to have ruled out the possibility of any influences on the military architecture of the Crusaders other than Byzantine.⁷ One reason for this assumption is that, just as the accepted view in Lawrence's day was 'that the Franks marched East with hardly any understanding of fortifications more elaborate than earthworks',⁸ so the accepted view was that the Arabs, and even more the Turks, came out of their desert existence as pastoral nomads to confront the Byzantine empire with no idea of the arts of civilisation at all and, like the Crusaders, learned everything they knew from the 'Greeks', contributing nothing of their own. This view is in keeping with the general attitude of archaeologists, anthropologists, and classicists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as recent major studies have shown.⁹ It is worth noting, however, that Lawrence later modified his views (which were not extreme in the first place) on at least one point, the origin of buttress-machicolations of the type found at Crac des Chevaliers in Syria, on the basis of Gertrude Bell's discovery of such structures on the eighth-century palace/fortress of Ukhaydir in Iraq.¹⁰ This last point illustrates how little was known at the time about Islamic military architecture. In order to transcend this limitation of available data, Lawrence would have had to produce a further thesis on Islamic military architecture.

Pringle went on to observe that 'A second difficulty besetting Lawrence's attempt to identify, or deny, Byzantine influence in Frankish castles was that his characterisation of Byzantine military architecture was based, of necessity, almost exclusively on Charles Diehl's treatment of the fortifications erected by Justinian and his immediate successors in North Africa in the sixth century. These may have little relevance, however, for determining the influence that surviving Byzantine fortifications or contemporary Byzantine military practice could have had on Crusader fortifications of the twelfth century'.¹¹ This last is, however, even less of a criticism of Lawrence than the previous point, since it would, in effect, have required a third thesis, this time on Byzantine military architecture. In summarising his assessment of Lawrence's work, Pringle states that: 'it seems unlikely that any definitive answer to the question of East-West influences in medieval castle-building will be possible until Crusader, Armenian, Muslim, Byzantine and, one should add, Italian and perhaps Spanish castles and town defences have been subjected to the same kind of scrutiny that English, Scottish, Welsh and French ones have undergone in the last seventy-five years. And even then it may well turn out that arguments for external stimulus and for indigenous development are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, international rivalry in military technology in the world illustrates how remarkably similar weapon systems, and counter-systems, can be developed by opposing sides apparently quite independently.

'Such as it is, the evidence reviewed here leads us to agree with Lawrence that the planning of many early twelfth-century Crusader castles owed more to the West than to the East and that twelfth-century castles built in the West, or at least in France and England, owed more to the native genius of their builders than to external influences from the East. But, this said, it also has to be recognised that, by the end of the twelfth century, techniques of fortification being practised in the Crusader states of Outremer were far in advance of those being used in the West; and it was not until the end of the thirteenth century that the West had anything to compare with Belvoir, Atlit, Safad or Tartus.'¹²

For a scholarly work to stand up so well to seventy-five years of further research is highly unusual. Such a piece of work has clearly been done to a very high standard.

Lawrence took part in one major excavation, at Jerablus, ancient Carchemish, from 1911 to 1914. During this period he was assistant to the director who, as was the custom on excavations in those days, was the only other qualified member of the team, which otherwise consisted of a local foreman and a large number of local workmen. From the beginning, Lawrence's special duty consisted of the study of the pottery. In the case of any attempt to assess the quality of Lawrence's work in this area, however, we are trebly handicapped. In the first place, World War I intervened before the excavation was completed and afterwards Lawrence was lost to archaeology, so that he never wrote up his own notes into a final report. When Woolley wrote the report on the pottery¹³ he included a few selections from these notes, which survive unpublished in the archives of the British Museum. 

Secondly, as Woolley reported many years later: 'Twice, in 1914 and again in 1920, we left Carchemish at the end of a season expecting to return in a few months' time, and the antiquities and a good part of our working material remained under guard in the Expedition house, and twice war wrought havoc with our work. Thus, in June 1914 the catalogue had been brought up to date and, of inscribed stone fragments alone, more than two thousand had been recorded, and complete type-lists of all Early Bronze Age pottery had been drawn up; during the war the catalogue and the type-sheets were destroyed and nearly all the objects themselves were scattered or broken'.^l4

Thirdly, as mentioned above, by the time Woolley came to write the final report, he had taken a dislike to Lawrence, which led him to underplay Lawrence's contribution. It seems that, in addition to work on the site, photography, and study of the pottery, Lawrence maintained the register of finds.¹⁵ Like many archaeologists who specialise in the study of pottery, Lawrence had an acute visual memory, which was particularly valuable at Carchemish, where he played a major part in the piecing together of the multitude of fragmentary statues and carved orthostats.¹⁶

The Wilderness of Zin survey was a quite different exercise. In the first place, it was a joint project with C. L. Woolley. In the second, it was simply a descriptive account of the ancient remains visible on the surface with dates as closely pinned down as was possible on the basis of such a superficial inspection. No attempt at a synthesis of any kind was made, and no problem was addressed other than the question 'What remains are there visible?' In this it resembled all surface surveys carried out before and since and, like all the best of these, it can be criticised on the basis of what the survey party did not see. In this case, this consists of the remains of the occupations of the earlier, pre-Roman, periods. In fact, these remains were not discovered until some thirty years later, by scholars blessed with far more time than Woolley and Lawrence had at their disposal, and with a far better knowledge of the archaeological cultures concerned, based on the many excavations carried out between the two world wars. In other words, so far as I am aware, few if any of the observations made by Woolley and Lawrence in this survey can be faulted, and I have yet to hear of a surface survey which located every site. Nevertheless, this work, although it was well done, and retains its value to this day, is not the sort of document on which one could base a reasonable  assessment of the archaeological abilities of any young scholar.

One of the best ways of assessing such abilities is to examine the opinions of those respected senior scholars who come into contact with him. Lawrence spent January 1912 working for Flinders Petrie.¹⁷ After an initial impression which was somewhat less than favourable,¹⁸ Petrie was sufficiently impressed with Lawrence to offer to provide him with £700 for two seasons' work in Bahrain, to be carried out by Lawrence.¹⁹ From the beginning of his career, Petrie operated under a chronic and extreme shortage of funds. The measures which he took to deal with this situation left him with the reputation of being exceptionally tight-fisted. Moreover, he had a hearty distrust of all those who had been formally trained in archaeology, as Lawrence had, which in Petrie's time usually meant that the student had been imbued with ideas far less advanced than Petrie's own brilliant insights. Hence, this offer may be seen as not merely generous, but as a mark of the highest respect from one of the greatest archaeologists of his own, or any other, age. Such an assessment must be taken very seriously indeed.

IV.  Summary: the promise unfulfilled

After the war Lawrence never returned to archaeology. It is difficult to know whether he would have done so, had it been possible, in the light of the terrible psychological scars with which the war left him. In the event, the decision was made for him by his fame which meant that, unlike Woolley, it was politically impossible for him to return to work anywhere in the Near East. Had he been in a position to do so, there is every reason to believe that he could have had an outstanding career as an archaeologist. He had the dedication required and, while such work as he did produce shows no sign of the kind of theoretical brilliance of a Petrie or a Childe, his quick mind, and his distrust of the orthodox answer, would seem to indicate that he could well have produced works of solid scholarship which would have set cats among pigeons in a way that would have led to real advances.


Sources

• M. Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical  Civilization, Vol. 1, The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785-1985 (London, Free Association Books, 1987)

• M. S. Drower, Flinders Petrie: A Life in Archaeology (London, Victor Gollancz, 1985)

• M. Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968)

• T. E. Lawrence, Crusader Castles (ed. R. D. Pringle, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1988)

• R. D. Pringle, 'Introduction' in T. E. Lawrence, Crusader Castles (ed. R. D. Pringle, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1988).

• B. G. Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought (Cambridge University Press, 1989)

• J. M. Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, The Authorised Biography of T. E. Lawrence (London, Heinemann, 1989)

• C. L. Woolley, Carchemish: Report on the Excavations at Jerablus on Behalf of the British Museum, Part III: The Excavations in the Inner Town (London, British Museum Publications Limited, 1952)

References

1.  Wilson 1989: 28
2.  Wilson 1989: 127-30
3.  Trigger 1989: 35-72
4.  Trigger 1989: 87-102
5.  Wilson 1989: 38-9
6.  Wilson 1989: 52-3
7.  Pringle 1988: xxvii
8.  Lawrence 1988: 4
9.  Trigger 1989: 110-47; Harris 1968: 80-107; Bernal 1987
10.  Pringle 1988: xxvi, 83n
11.  Pringle 1988: xxviii
12.  Pringle 1988: xxxix
13.  Woolley 1952: 227-37
14.  Woolley 1952: i
15.  Wilson 1989: 129
16.  Wilson 1989: 121, 129
17.  Wilson 1989: 99-100; Drower 1985: 319-20
18.  Drower 1985: 320
19.  Wilson 1989: 99-100; Drower 1985: 320

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