Abstract
ARCHÆOLOGISTS nowadays for the most part, having other preoccupations, have ceased investigations in the field. Nevertheless, experience in the last war showed that military operations may bring to light evidence which, when recorded with such note of the conditions of discovery as circumstances permit, may point the way, as happened in the Macedonian campaign of 1915–18, to further and valuable fields for further research in later days of more assured tranquillity. The valuable collection of prehistoric antiquities at Salonica is not only an enduring monument to the devotion to archæological studies and the flair of those archæologists who served in the forces in that theatre of the war, but also, on the cessation of hostilities, it served as the starting-point of a series of investigations in the Macedonian field which have thrown a flood of light on cultural movement in this borderland of prehistoric Greece. Nor should it be allowed to be forgotten that it was directly out of Dr. R. C. Campbell-Thompson's military service in Mesopotamia, which afforded him opportunity for an archæological reconnaissance, that there grew the joint expedition of the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania to Ur, at first under the direction of the late Dr. H. R. Hall, and later of Sir Leonard Woolley—as a whole, and in its effect on study of the growth of early civilizations, which is still far from being exhausted, one of the most momentous in a long series of discoveries in the history of archæology.
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Field Archæology in War Time. Nature 144, 589 (1939). https://doi.org/10.1038/144589a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/144589a0