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Bloody Old Britain: O. G. S. Crawford and the Archaeology of Modern Life (review)

What concepts of history are fixed in an aerial photograph? Has the taking of pictures of cities and landscapes from an airplane created its own methodology, one that considers natural and built environments as susceptible to visible historical forces? Does the aerial view create its own historical record? The issues of viewing things from above, of considering the history of these things when viewed and photographed from an airplane, of thinking about this process of photographing things from above as historical method, of peeling away layers of modernity to catch a glimpse of what lies underneath— these all implicate the work and writing of O. G. S. Crawford (1886– 1957), a pioneer of the use of aerial photographs in archaeological excavations. Thanks to Kitty Hauser, a postdoctoral scholar at the Power Institute for Art and Visual Culture in Sydney, Australia, Crawford has become more familiar to audiences than ever. Her 2007 book, Shadow Sites: Photography, Archaeology, and the British Landscape, 1927–1955, looks to several case studies to understand how a group of English artists, writers, and filmmakers adopted a historicized, neoromantic, and countermodernist view of landscape. It is within this rubric that Hauser considers Antiquity, the publication Crawford founded in 1927, as well as his methods for photographing archaeological sites from the air. Both are examples of what Hauser refers to as the “archaeological imagination,” the “perceiving of a past which is literally under our feet” that “represents a powerful counter impulse to this culture of interchangeable surfaces covering over all traces of history” and that calls home “a historical dimension to which the contemporary world seems so indifferent.”1 In her latest book, Bloody Old Britain: O. G. S. Crawford and the Archaeology of Modern Life, Hauser expands her treatment of Crawford’s work by adopting a more quasi biographical approach. Crawford’s life becomes a series of vignettes unified by his interest in archaeology. In Shadow Sites, Hauser understands Crawford’s innovations in aerial photography as