Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/74

 66 FRANCIS HAVERFIELD January in company with Professor Pelham, whom he was afterwards to succeed in the Camden chair. On these occasions he conducted numerous minor ' digs ', publishing the results in successive volumes of the Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Archaeological Society } While he laid stress on the need of excavation and had long practical experience in it, he never took personal control over the digging of any large site. He was not an excavator in the same * degree that he was an epigraphist. But, during the later years of his life, there was no important excavation conducted in this country in which he was not actively interested. When, in 1907, exploration on an extensive scale was commenced on the site of the Roman frontier-town of Corstopitum near Corbridge, he was invited to join the excavation committee, of which he became a leading member, and procured for it grants from the university of Oxford.^ He was instrumental in getting the Society of Anti- quaries (of which he was a vice-president) to establish a research fund from which grants might be made to similar undertakings, and to undertake the excavation of Wroxeter. His conviction that classical archaeology needed better endowment found practical expression in his will, by which he has bequeathed to Oxford a reversionary interest in his estate for the promotion of Romano-British studies. He felt that, if excavation was to be really fruitful, it should be scientific and be carried on under competent control. He desired to see such excavations as Corbridge and Wroxeter made home training-grounds for young archaeologists from the universities. With this in view, he spent every summer before the war at Corbridge, and brought thither pupils from Oxford, many of whom there gained their first experience of practical archaeology. He impressed upon them the importance of registering and classifying the so-called minor objects which the previous generation of excavators had frequently treated with neglect. On every site where extensive excavations were carried on there ought, he considered, to be a workshop for sorting and recording finds, and a temporary museum for displaying them. Coins, pottery, and bronze fibulae all provided valuable dating material, and so helped to reveal the history of the site. On the ^ For the various reports of the Cumberland Excavation Committee, all contributed to these Transactions by Haverfield, see xiii. 453-69 ( 1894), xiv. 185-97 ( 1895), xiv. 413- 27(1896), XV. 172-90(1897), XV. 345-64(1898), xvL 80-99(1899); New Series, L 75-92 (1900), ii 384-92 ( 1901), iiL 328^9 ( 1902). The reports for 1894-9 have been reprinted in a single volume along with a summary of ' Five Years' Excavation on the Roman WaU'. ' The reports of the committee for 1907-14, published in Archaeologia Aeliana, 3rd series, vols, iv-ix (1907-12) and xi-xii (1913-14), all contain sections contributed by Haverfield on inscriptions, sculptures, and minor finds.