History of Archaeology Timeline

The itinerant scholar Cyriacus of Ancona traveled throughout Greece recording his findings on ancient buildings and objects. He was the most enterprising recorder of Greek and Roman antiquities in the fifteenth century, earning the title founding father of modern classical archaeology.

Image source: Cyriacus of Ancona

Flavio Biondo, an Italian Renaissance humanist historian, created a systematic guide to the ruins and topography of ancient Rome in the early 15th century, for which he has been called an early founder of archaeology.

Image source: Flavio Biondo

The 15th and 16th centuries saw the rise of antiquarians in Renaissance Europe such as Flavio Biondo who were interested in the collection of artifacts.

Image source: Antiquarian

English antiquarians of the 16th century including John Leland and William Camden conducted topographical surveys of England's countryside, drawing, describing and interpreting the monuments that they encountered.

Image source: William Camden

The first known excavations made at Stonehenge were conducted by William Harvey and Gilbert North in the early 17th century.

Image source: Stonehenge

John Aubrey wrote Monumenta Britannica in the late 17th century as a survey of early urban and military sites, including Roman towns, hillforts, and castles, and a review of archaeological remains including sepulchral monuments, roads, coins and urns.

Image source: John Aubrey

Tentative steps towards the systematization of archaeology as a science took place during the Enlightenment era in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Image source: History of archaeology

William Stukeley was another antiquarian who contributed to the early development of archaeology in the early 18th century, notably through his studies of Stonehenge and Avebury.

Image source: William Stukeley

Excavations began in 1738 at Herculaneum under the auspices of King Charles VII of Naples, uncovering the buried Roman city destroyed by Vesuvius.

Image source: Herculaneum

Excavations began in 1748 at Pompeii, revealing remarkable details of daily life in the Roman world preserved beneath volcanic ash.

Image source: Pompeii

In Herculaneum, the Theatre, the Basilica and the Villa of the Papyri were discovered in 1768, adding major structures to knowledge of Roman architecture.

Image source: Villa of the Papyri

Antiquarianism focused on empirical evidence for understanding the past, encapsulated in the motto of the 18th-century antiquary Sir Richard Colt Hoare: 'We speak from facts not theory'.

Image source: Sir Richard Hoare, 2nd Baronet

In America, Thomas Jefferson supervised the systematic excavation of a Native American burial mound on his land in Virginia in 1784, possibly inspired by his experiences in Europe.

Image source: Thomas Jefferson

In the late 18th to 19th century archaeology became a national endeavor as personal cabinets of curios turned into national museums.

Image source: List of national museums

The OED first cites 'archaeologist' from 1824; this soon took over as the usual term for one major branch of antiquarian activity. 'Archaeology' itself, from 1607 onwards, initially meant ancient history generally, with the narrower modern sense first seen in 1837.

Image source: Archaeology

Archaeology evolved into a much more systematic discipline in the late 19th century, moving beyond amateur pastime status it still held as late as the mid-19th century, and became a widely used tool for historical and anthropological research in the 20th century.

In 1880, Augustus Pitt Rivers began excavations on lands that came to him in inheritance and which contained a wealth of archaeological material from the Roman and Saxon periods, pioneering systematic, scientific excavation methods.

Image source: Augustus Pitt Rivers

In nineteenth-century Mexico, the expansion of the National Museum of Anthropology and the excavation of major archaeological ruins by Leopoldo Batres were part of the liberal regime of Porfirio Díaz to create a glorious image of Mexico's pre-Hispanic past.

Flinders Petrie was responsible for mentoring and training a whole generation of Egyptologists, including Howard Carter, who went on to achieve fame with the discovery of the tomb of 14th-century BCE pharaoh Tutankhamun.

Image source: Flinders Petrie

Napoleon's army carried out excavations during its Egyptian campaign in 1798–1801, which was also the first major overseas archaeological expedition.

Image source: French campaign in Egypt and Syria

William Cunnington (1754–1810), regarded as the father of archaeological excavation, undertook excavations in Wiltshire from around 1798 in collaboration with his regular excavators Stephen and John Parker of Heytesbury.

Image source: William Cunnington

In 1803, there was widespread criticism of Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin for removing the Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon in Athens, sparking early debates on cultural heritage.

Image source: Elgin Marbles

Richard Colt Hoare, who inherited the Stourhead estate in 1785, turned to antiquarian pursuits and began funding Cunnington's excavations in 1804, becoming his wealthiest patron.

The first reference to the use of a trowel on an archaeological site was made in a letter from Cunnington to Hoare in 1808, describing John Parker using one in the excavation of Bush Barrow.

Image source: Bush Barrow

Cunnington's site reports and descriptions were published by Hoare in The Ancient Historie of Wiltshire in 1810, a copy of which is kept at Stourhead.

In the third and fourth decades of the 19th century, archaeologists like Jacques Boucher de Perthes and Christian Jürgensen Thomsen began to put the artifacts they had found in chronological order, developing stratigraphy as a major achievement of 19th century archaeology.

Image source: Christian Jürgensen Thomsen

Jacques Boucher de Perthes (1788–1868) established a much deeper sense of time in Antiquités celtiques et antédiluviennes (1847), challenging Ussher's biblical chronology that dated creation to 23 October 4004 BCE.

Image source: Jacques Boucher de Crèvecœur de Perthes