Archaeology and modern times: Bersu&apos;s Woodbury 1938 &amp; 1939

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Abstract

Fifty years ago this month there began the second Great European War of the century, a war that followed an uncomfortable decade of tensions and persecutions. It is a fitting time to remember the work of Gerhard Bersu, the most distinguished of archaeological refugees into Britain from that persecution.

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Excavations at Little Woodbury, Wiltshire.

Gerhard Bersu (1940)

The aim of the Prehistoric Society in undertaking excavations was to uncover systematically a complete settlement and to discover as much as possible about it as a social and economic organism. Little Woodbury had much to recommend it. The existence of a good air-photograph meant that no efforts need be wasted on unproductive work, besides promising interesting results for the interpretation of air-photographs. Being typical of a whole group, its elucidation might be expected to throw light upon a number of similar sites. Further, experience has shown that incontestable results are to be won most readily where the habitation is not too dense and where occupation has been confined to one period. The air-photograph seemed to promise the former, while the test excavations carried out by Mr C. W. Phillips, F.S.A., in March 1938, suggested that the settlement was substantially of the Iron Age A culture.

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The Archeology of Knowledge.

M Foucault, Foucault M, FOUCAULT … (1974)

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Changing Methods and Aims in Prehistory: Presidential Address for 1935.

V. Gordon Childe (1935)

This is the first Presidential Address to be delivered before our Society since it has become the Prehistoric Society without qualification. It seems therefore appropriate to choose in preference to any particular problem the general topic of the aims and methods of our science. The last ten years have witnessed an extraordinary increase in the data available to the prehistorian and a remarkable expansion in the field he must survey. For this very reason we have been led to a revaluation of the methods and concepts to be employed in the interpretation of our material. To arrange and classify data pouring in from every corner of the world parochial categories that worked well enough for local collections can no longer serve. Prehistoric archaeology has twin roots and a dual function; it tries on the one hand to prolong written history backward beyond the oldest literary records, on the other to carry natural history forward from the point where geology and palaeontology would leave it. In practice prehistoric remains were first systematically studied with a view to supplementing the information about Celts, Druids, Britons, Picts and Germans provided by ancient authors. But it was the union with geology after the acceptance of Boucher de Perthe's discoveries that made prehistory a science.