Bloody Old Britain

'Our field is the earth,' wrote OGS Crawford in 1927, in his capacity as founding editor of the journal Antiquity, 'our range in time a million years or so, our subject the human race.' This grandiose manifesto was written by one of archaeology's lesser known heroes, a tactiturn man, who - as Kitty Hauser shows in this remarkable book - devoted most of his life both to his work and a twentieth-century political ideal, but ended his days disillusioned by the rapidly changing world around him.

Crawford was born in India in 1886; his mother died a few days after giving birth, so he was sent back to England to be brought up by two of his father's unmarried sisters. Later, he was a boarder at Marlborough, whose only saving grace in his eyes was the Archaeological  Society, which organised field trips to ancient sites in the Thames Valley.

Thus began Crawford's lifelong fascination with the past. He would set out from school on foot or by bicycle to discover the human-made marks in the landscape as plotted on 1-inch Ordnance Survey maps. Later, during the First World War, he was sent on aerial reconnaissance expeditions above northern France, photographing enemy positions from on high. Crawford - and his superiors - soon discovered that he had a knack for this work; it wasn't much of a leap of the imagination for him to realise that the same techniques would pay dividends if applied to the ancient landscape back home.

And so it proved. Aerial photographs of the patchwork quilt of England, if taken at just the right time of day and in specific weather conditions are beautiful to behold. They reveal humps and bumps unseen on the ground, but clearly delineated from above: ancient field systems, burial mounds, the remains of farmsteads, army camps and roads emerge like shadowy ghosts.

Crawford had a real eye for this; 'he saw things where others saw nothing'. In an attempt to explain the clarity with which aerial photographs could reveal the amount of archaeological evidence right under the noses of the ground-based historian, he took a photo of a patterned carpet as seen by a cat and then one as seen by a man. The blurry indistinctness of the former is rendered sensible by the latter.

After the war, Crawford became the Ordnance Survey's first Archaeology Officer. It was a tenuous post, but Crawford managed to hang on to it by a mixture of hard work, inspiration and bloody-minded irritability. He produced a series of maps of the ancient British landscape, which became bestsellers for the OS. Alongside this work, and to tap into the general public's increasing interest in archaeology in the 1920s and 30s, he founded the aforementioned Antiquity journal to publicise the work of a new wave of archaeologists, who were uncovering some of ancient Britain's greatest sites. It was the dawn of professional archaeology.

Crawford's other major interest at this time was a burgeoning faith in communism as the template for a new way of living. He visited the Soviet Union  and marvelled at the collective ways in which the people now existed, free from the shackles of the old bourgeois order. Crawford believed that 'human society should obey the same laws of development of all living things' and that this process was under way in an accelerated form in the Soviet Union. Surely it would only be a matter of time before the World State became a reality.

Crawford wrote a glowing book about his expedition to Russia, entitled A Tour in Bolshevy. It was never published (luckily, given his subsequent disillusionment with communism). Neither was Crawford's other book, Bloody Old Britain, a misanthropic diatribe against what was happening to his native country. Nothing escaped his bitter  gaze: awful hotels; the spread of advertising hoardings; poorly designed cutlery. 'A visceral distaste for the debasements of life in modern Britain was commonplace in the literary culture of the decade,' Hauser points out (quoting John Carey), but Crawford's spleen seems to have been vented more thoroughly than those of his contemporaries. Only the most blinkered reader would fail to make comparisons with twenty-first-century Britain.

Kitty Hauser has written a beautiful (and beautifully illustrated) book about a difficult man whose impact on the development of modern archaeology was profound. What is equally interesting about the book is the context in which Crawford worked and lived, and as such is a potted history of the forces that overwhelmed the twentieth century. Crawford, like many of his colleagues and friends, had his hopes of a new society dashed as the world around him became uglier and more, not less, patriotic. In the end, it was only 'science, pure and supremely rational, which transcended the petty and the partisan, rendering clan loyalty and religion alike unnecessary' which commanded his devotion. It wasn't enough for a man who had expected so much.