Report On Excavations in the Pen Pits, Near Penselwood, Somerset

Report On Excavations in the Pen Pits, Near Penselwood, Somerset is an 1884 archaeological report by Lieutenant-General Augustus Pitt Rivers (1827-1900), the British army officer and archaeologist who founded modern field archaeology and the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford. Pitt Rivers led careful excavations on his Cranborne Chase estate and on neighbouring sites and developed the recording standards, typology, and stratigraphic discipline that became the basis of professional twentieth-century archaeology. This report covers the Pen Pits, a group of curious shaft-and-chamber features near Penselwood on the Somerset and Wiltshire border that were variously interpreted at the time as Roman millstone quarries or as British dwellings. Pitt Rivers’s account argues for a quarrying origin and is illustrated with the careful drawings and finds tables for which his work became famous. Free PDF download available on BDeBooks.