O. G. S. Crawford

Osbert Guy Stanhope Crawford was a British archaeologist whose work focused on the prehistoric periods of Britain and Sudan. He became a strong advocate for using aerial photography in archaeology and spent the bulk of his career as the archaeological officer for the Ordnance Survey, in addition to authoring several books on archaeological topics.

Crawford was born in Bombay, British India, to a wealthy Scottish middle-class family. As an infant, he was sent to England, where his aunts raised him in London and Hampshire. He studied geography at Keble College, Oxford, and worked briefly in that field before turning fully to archaeology. For the philanthropist Henry Wellcome, he directed the excavation of Abu Geili in Sudan, then returned to England just before the First World War. During the war, he served with the London Scottish Regiment and the Royal Flying Corps, handling ground and aerial reconnaissance on the Western Front. After an injury forced him to recuperate in England, he went back to the front, was captured by the German Army in 1918, and remained a prisoner of war until the conflict ended.

In 1920, Crawford joined the Ordnance Survey, travelling across Britain to record archaeological sites on maps and discovering several previously unknown ones. His growing interest in aerial archaeology led him to use Royal Air Force photographs to determine the full extent of the Stonehenge Avenue, which he excavated in 1923. Alongside the archaeologist Alexander Keiller, he carried out an aerial survey of many southern English counties and helped raise funds to secure the land around Stonehenge for the National Trust. In 1927, he founded the scholarly journal *Antiquity*, which featured contributions from many of Britain’s leading archaeologists, and in 1939 he served as president of the Prehistoric Society. An internationalist and socialist, Crawford was influenced by Marxism and for a time sympathised with the Soviet Union. During the Second World War, he worked for the National Buildings Record, photographically documenting Southampton. After retiring in 1946, he returned to studying Sudanese archaeology and wrote several more books before his death.

Colleagues and friends described Crawford as cantankerous and irritable. His contributions—especially through *Antiquity* and aerial archaeology—have been widely praised, with some calling him one of the great pioneers in the field. His photographic archive remained useful to archaeologists well into the 21st century. A biography by Kitty Hauser appeared in 2008.