WOOLLEY, CHARLES LEONARD

(b. Upper Clapton, London, England, 17 April 1880; d. London, 20 February 1960)

archarology.

Woolley was the son of the Reverend George Herbert Woolley and Sarah Cathcart. He received a degree from New College, Oxford, and intended to become a schoolmaster. W. A. Spooner, warden of New College, decided, however, that Woolley was to be an archaeologist. Woolley therefore became assistant to Sir Arthur Evans at the Ashmolean Museum in 1905, and did his first fieldwork and digging at Corbridge, northumberland. He wrote in his autobiography, Spadework (1953): “I know only too well that the work there would have scandalized, and rightly . . . and British archaeologist of today. It was however typical of what was done forty–five years ago, when field–archaeology was, comparatively speaking, in its infancy and few diggers in this country thought it necessary to follow the example of that great pioneer, Pitt Rivers.”

Woolley’s work in the Near East began in 1907, when he dug with D. Randall–Maclver in Nubia. In 1912 he was appointed to succeed Reginald Campbell Thompson as director of the British Museum expedition to Carchemish. He was accompanied by T. E. Lawrence, with whom,after a subsequent six–week archaeological reconnaissance, he wrote The Wilderness of Zin (1915). During World War I, Woolley served as an intelligence officer on the British General Staff in Egypt.

The war had ended excavation in the Middle East, but work was recommenced as soon as hostilities ceased. Even before the 1918 armistice Thompson began digging at Ur and Eridu, under the auspices of the British Museum. On the strength of his finds, the museum sent an expedition under H. R. Hall to dig at both sites. Hall also found al’Ubaid, a new site four miles west of Ur. In 1922 a joint expedition of the British Museum and the Museum ofthe University of Pennsylvania, directed by Woolley, continued Thompson and Hall’s work. Woolley began at Ur, then transferred his attention to al’Ubaid, returning to Ur inj 1926and the following years. It was in 1926 that the great prehistoric cemetery at Ur, with its “royal tombs,” was discovered and excavated. The discovery of these tombs, with their splendid treasures of gold and lapis lazuli and their remarkable evidence of funerary ritual, caused a sensation comparable with Schliemann’s discoveries at Mycenae and those of Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter of Tutankhamen’s tomb. Woolley dug at Ur, Eridu, and al’Ubaid for thirteen years, publishing preliminary reports in Antiquaries Journal andthe full report in a series of volumes between 1928 and 1938.

At Ur, Woolley demonstrated his remarkable insight into the methods used by early craftsmen and builders. The joint expedition under Woolley not only inaugurated a brilliant revival of excavation in Mesopotamia in the 1920’s and 1930’s; it also was responsible for widespread popular interest in Mesopotamian archaeology and the origins of civilization there. In 1900 very few people had heard of the Sumerians, but by 1930 the Sumerians had been added to the collection of prehistoric peoples of whom almost everyone knew something. This was due in part to the sensational nature of the Ur excavations, but also to the clear and helpful popular accounts published by Woolley, notably Ur of the Chaldees (1929), The Sumerians (1930), Abraham, Recent Discoveries and Hebrew Origins (1936), and Excavations at Ur: A Record of Twelve Years Work (1954).

Like W. M. Flinders Petrie and A. H. Pitt–Rivers, Woolley believed passionately that the results of archaeology must be communicated to the general public in readable form. It has been said, in criticism of his work, that he ran ahead of what could reasonably be inferred; but he was always certain of what he was doing in the scholarly popularization ofarchaeology. As Sir Max Mallowan said, “If his imagination sometimes outran the facts, that to him was preferable to allowing knowledge to lie dormant and inconclusive.” The freshness and relevance of his popularization can be seen not only in the books on Ur and the Sumerians but also in Spadework, written when he was in his seventies, and Dead Towns and Living Men, written in 1920.

His great work in Mesopotamia over, Woolley dug at al–Mina, near Antioch, and at Atchana during 1937–1939 and 1946–1949. Atchana–Alalkh was revealed as the ancient Hittite capital of the province of Hatay in Turkey (now the sanjak of Alexandretta): it was destroyed in 1200 B. C. but had nine periods of occupation dating back from the latter year to the twentieth century B. C. The results were published in a popular account, AForgotten Kingdom (1953), and in The Alakh Exacavations and Tell Atchana (1958). These works again showed Woolley’s strength and purpose: he always publishedhis results in exemplary and scholarly form, and also communicated them to the general public. As Sir Max Mallowan said: “To have dug so much and left nothing unwritten was indeed a phenomenal record.”

In 1938 Woolley was invited by the government of India to advise it on the developmentand organization of archaeology there: his plans, not implemented until the 1940’s were carried out by Sir MOrtimer Wheeler, director general of archaeology for India. During World War II, Woolley was specially employed in the safeguarding of museums, libraries, archives, and art galleries. Knighted in 1935, he continued working in the last quarter–century of his life, producing with Jacquetta Hawkes the first volume of the UNESCO Historyof Mankind (1963).

Woolley married Katharine Elizabeth Keeling in 1927.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Woolley’s principal works are mentioned in the text. In addition see article in Dictionary of National Biography and obituary in The Times (22 Feb. 1960).

Glyn Daniel