N O. 1 2 2 T H E T R U S T Y S E R VA N T
Rediscovering Thomas Ashby( F, 1887-93) in Malta
Dr SKF Stoddart( F, 71-76) writes:
One of the distinctive, but not always remembered, features of a Wykehamical education is its long-standing impact on the world of archaeology, particularly in the Mediterranean. The influence started early and derived from the Classical Education of pupils at the School. Francis Cranmer Penrose( 1817-1903), David George Hogarth( 1862-1927), Sir John Linton Myres( 1869-1954) and John Devitt Stringfellow Pendlebury( 1904-41) were some of the leading figures in the study of Greek civilisation. An equally powerful genealogy leads from Francis Haverfield( 1860-1919) through Thomas Ashby( 1874-1931) to John Ward-Perkins( 1912- 81), investigating the world of early Italy.
These last two figures were some of the most important directors, in the last century, of the British School at Rome, a research institution that still leads and coordinates British fine-art practice and humanities research in Italy. This pair of scholars initiated a tradition of landscape archaeology that has become a hallmark of British Archaeology at an international level. In part, this was a pragmatic response to the fact that British archaeologists were not granted Italian permits to excavate in the first half of the 20th century. It may also be significant that walking fields in search of ancient artefacts is substantially cheaper than excavation. In addition, the trend was drawn from a deeply embedded British tradition of appreciating landscape, enshrined in Morning Hills, which had been started in 1884 by Fearon, some three years before Ashby entered Southgate House( the current Chawker’ s). Walking remained Ashby’ s main relaxation throughout his life.
Thomas Ashby also followed another practical route by undertaking excavation in the nearest British colony, Malta, where permits could be freely granted. His friendship with Themistocles Zammit, the father of Maltese archaeology, in the period prior to the First World War, is one of the most important intellectual collaborations in the history of archaeology. The practical science of Dr. Zammit was combined with the excavation experience and historical knowledge of Ashby, drawn from his fellow Wykehamist and Oxford graduates John Myres and Francis Haverfield, to produce an ideal partnership on the Maltese islands. This partnership laid the foundations for our knowledge of Maltese archaeology, preserving a record that might otherwise have been lost.
Ashby was not content with the relatively unassuming classical archaeology on the Maltese islands, at least compared with his base in Rome, even though he excavated one important Roman villa and provided a first synthesis of the then-available evidence. Guided by Zammit, Ashby was drawn to what is now known to be the earliest European Architecture, dating to the fourth millennium BC through calibrated radiocarbon dating. His excavations of the‘ temples’ of a Hagar Qim, Kordin( 1908-9) and Santa Verna( 1911) were the first systematic stratigraphic excavations of what are now recognised as UNESCO World Heritage Sites. It was this collaboration that led Zammit to apply a developed excavation strategy to the later excavations of Tarxien during the First World War, leading to the recovery of some of the most perfectly preserved prehistoric ritual on the Maltese islands.
Our current project, once again an Anglo-Maltese collaboration with a Wykehamist involvement, has followed in Ashby’ s footsteps, most notably at Santa Verna and Kordin. At Santa Verna, although Ashby was himself struck with dysentery, his team opened up a large area of the site, revealing floors and substantial megalithic structures, collecting a number of distinctive sea-shell figurines in baked clay, as well as a wealth of fine pottery and stone artefacts. He also identified the presence of a later graveyard on the site that gave the megalithic structure its Christianised name.
At Santa Verna in 2015, we have recovered the location of his very trenches and confirmed the accuracy of his methods. In the same way as his approach was a step ahead of all that preceded, we like to think that our work has also added new scientific insights. Most notably we have shown that this site is indeed another‘ temple’ monument, both by better definition of its plan and by discovery of more liturgical artefacts in the form of baked clay sea-shell figurines. Indeed, this‘ temple’ seems to have been of the same scale and orientation as the more famous gantija monument on the same plateau, where we also undertook fieldwork, and where the newly opened visitor centre records our work on the contemporary cemetery in the late 1980s and early 1990s. We have also demonstrated that this same site of Santa Verna dates back to the very earliest occupation of the Maltese islands in the sixth millennium BC, when fertile humic soils and heavier vegetation cover were still in existence. Indeed these impressive monuments, as large as small modern churches, seem to have emerged from prosperous settlements located preferentially close to water and the better soils, within the arid landscape of the islands.
The current project also draws on Ashby’ s contribution by examining the landscape. The detection of environmental indicators, such as ancient
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