Aeroplane and Spade
Wessex from the Air. By 0. G. S. Crawford, F.S.A., and Alexander Keiller, F.S.A., F.G.S. (Clarendon Press. 50s.) NoT the least of the many services which the aeroplane is rendering to civilization is its help in revealing the past. During the War English airmen in Mesopotamia and German airmen in Southern Palestine realized that photographs taken from aeroplanes could be of great interest to the archaeologist, and might reveal to him things that he could not recognize on the ground. Messrs. Crawford and Keller have developed the idea and applied it to the study of ancient sites in our, own West Country with remarkable success• Working over Salisbury Plain and Cranborne Chase, they have detected and photographed many early settlements.. They have now published about fifty of their photographs with commentaries and plans, in an imposing volume which every student of ancient Britain will find both interesting and valuable.
two of the plates show the Stonehenge avenue, which can be clearly seen from the air. It was the accidental rediscovery of this avenue, unsuspected by the many archaeo- logists who have worked at Stonehenge, on a photograph casually taken by an airman that attracted attention to the importance of air-photography. The authors point out
that chalk, once disturbed, never again becomes compacted, and the plants growing on it are sensitive to the slight differences in its structure. If a ditch has been made and refilled, whether by the hand of man or by nature, the corn growing above it will be of a darker green than the rest of the field. Hence the observer from above, or his camera, can see, clearly marked, the outlines of long-forgotten ditches and pits that mark prehistoric or, at any rate, pre-Saxon settlements. The lynchets or low banks that once bounded fields cast shadows at sunrise or sunset when they are viewed from the air, and thus the authors can confidently assert the former existence of farms on the downs where no man since Saxon times has ever followed the plough. They fully confirm the belief of archaeologists like the late General Pitt-Rivers that the Celtic and pre-Celtic inhabitants of this island lived on the high ground in preference to the river-valleys where the later Saxons settled. The whole book is, in fact, an exposition of this doctrine, with many striking examples. It seems strange to us that our predecessors should have fixed their habitations on the bare and wind-swept uplands, but the evidence is overwhelming. Doubtless they dreaded the fevers of the undrained and marshy valleys, and the dangers of the forests which coverea much of England then ; also they feared their neighbours, or they would not have constructed so many great and elaborate hill-forts, like Danebury and Yarnbury in this book or Chanctonbury afid Cissbury on the South Downs north of Worthing.
Another important conclusion must be drawn from this book. There was a definite break between the Celtic and the Saxon civilizations. The late Professor Haverfleld, the greatest authority on Roman Britain who has ever lived, was definitely of opinion that Rome's legacy to us was indirect, that the invading Saxons did not take over and continue either the agricultural system or the towns that they found here. They let the towns and villas go to ruin ; they did not make much use of the Roman roads ; their rural settlements were mostly on new sites, and their methods of cultivation were wholly unlike those of the Celts whom they had dispossessed. We shall never know the full details of the two terrible centuries—the fifth and sixth— during which the Romano-British society was wiped out and replaced by an Anglo-Saxon society, which had to be Christianized afresh by St. Augustine. But the aeroplane is now co-operating with the spade to supply many illustrative facts for this mysterious period.
Mr. Crawford and Mr. Keiller have elucidated their wonder- ful photographs with all the information that they could gather. on the ground or from maps and books. In one case, that of Wudu-burh, a rectangular earthwork on Knighton Hill to the west of Salisbury, Mr. R. C. C. Clay has carefully trenched the site in numerous places, and proved that the earthwork was made in the early Iron Age and used in Romano-British days, probably as a cattle enclosure. But most of the camps and barrows are doubtless far earlier than this, and will repay closer examination. The authors' map shows, incidentally, that Stonehenge, like Avebury, was not, in prehistoric times, a remote and isolated monument, but rather the central point of an inhabited district with many upland villages. We may almost say. that Salisbury. Plain in war-time, with its numerous camps and hutments, reproduced the conditions of the Bronze Age. Mr. Crawford and Mr. Keiller's remark- able book inspires many such queer reflections.
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