William Gowland
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Professor William Gowland (1842-1922) was a mining engineer most famous for his archaeological work at Stonehenge. He worked at the Royal School of Mines at South Kensington but was also a Fellow of the Royal Society and an expert in early metal-working. He is known in Japan as the Father of Japanese Archaeology.
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[edit] In England
On New Year's Eve 1900, a trilithon at Stonehenge fell over and the owner of the site, Sir Edmund Antrobus undertook to right it and set it in concrete for safety purposes. Following public pressure and a letter to The Times by William Flinders Petrie, he agreed to re-erect the stones under archaeological supervision so that records could be made of the below ground archaeology.
Antrobus appointed Gowland to manage the job who despite having no previous archaeological field experience produced some of the finest, most detailed excavation records ever made at the monument. The only open ground he saw was that around the fallen Stone 56, an area measuring around 17ft by 13ft, and the difficulty was compounded in that only small areas were dug at each time to allow the concrete to be poured and set.
Despite these difficulties, he established that antler picks had been used to dig the stone holes and that the stones themselves had been worked to shape on site. His work identified the 'Stonehenge layer', a thin strata of bluestone chips that sealed many of the non-megalithic features at the site and proved that they predated the standing stones.
[edit] In Japan (1872-88)
During his stay in Japan as one of the foreigners (o-yatoi gaikokujin) employed to aid the modernization of Japan, Gowland worked for the Japanese Mint and in his spare time conducted the first truly accurate scientific surveys of burial mounds (kofun) of the 3rd-7th centuries, including a number of imperial mausolea.
After returning to England he published two books about his findings.
- The Dolmens of Japan and their Builders,1889
- The Dolmens and Burial Mounds in Japan,1897
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- Chippendale, C "Stonehenge Complete" (Thames and Hudson, London, 2004)
- William Gowland: The Father of Japanese Archaeology, edited by Victor Harris and Kazuo Goto, British Museum Press 2004, ISBN 0-7141-2420-6
