Augustus Pitt Rivers

Augustus Pitt Rivers was a British army officer, archaeologist, museum founder, and influential advocate of systematic field recording. Report On Excavations in the Pen Pits, Near Penselwood, Somerset documents his 1883 investigation of a landscape marked by numerous pits whose date and purpose had prompted public debate. Pitt Rivers examined their relationship to nearby earthworks, recorded sections and finds, and used the evidence to challenge confident claims about the site’s origin. The Pitt Rivers Museum archive identifies the privately printed 1884 report among his papers and preserves correspondence describing the excavation. Its research history also places the work within a dispute involving antiquarians, newspapers, and competing interpretations of the pits. Report On Excavations in the Pen Pits, Near Penselwood, Somerset therefore illustrates a central feature of Pitt Rivers’s archaeological method: conclusions should follow measured observations, plans, and stratigraphic relationships. The study is narrower than his later multi-volume excavation reports, but it shows the disciplined documentation that helped shape professional archaeological practice in Britain.