page_title: O. G. S. Crawford
section_title: Foreign visits and Marxism
hierarchical_section_title: O. G. S. Crawford / Career: 1920–1945 / Foreign visits and Marxism
caption_attribution_description: English: Photo from Dannevirke i 2008 Norsk bokmål: Foto av Danevirke i 2008
context_page_description: Osbert Guy Stanhope Crawford was a British archaeologist who specialised in the study of prehistoric Britain and the archaeology of Sudan. For most of his career the archaeological officer of the Ordnance Survey, he wrote a range of books on archaeological subjects and was a keen proponent of aerial archaeology.
  Born in Bombay, British India, to a wealthy middle-class Scottish family, Crawford moved to England as an infant and was raised by his aunts in London and Hampshire. He studied geography at Keble College, Oxford, and worked briefly in that field before devoting himself professionally to archaeology. Employed by the philanthropist Henry Wellcome, Crawford oversaw the excavation of Abu Geili in Sudan before returning to England shortly before the First World War. During the conflict he served in both the London Scottish Regiment and the Royal Flying Corps, where he was involved in ground and aerial reconnaissance along the Western Front. After an injury forced a period of convalescence in England, he returned to the Western Front, where he was captured by the German Army in 1918 and held as a prisoner of war until the end of the conflict.
context_section_description: Crawford enjoyed foreign travel. In 1928 the OS sent him to the Middle East to collect aerial photographs that had been produced during the First World War and which were stored at Baghdad, Amman, and Heliopolis. In mid-1931 he visited Germany and Austria, furthering his interest in photography through the purchase of a Voigtländer. He later visited Italy with the intent of examining the possibility of producing OS maps pinpointing the country's archaeological sites; in November 1932 he met with the Italian leader Benito Mussolini, who was interested in Crawford's ideas about creating an OS map of archaeological sites in Rome. This was part of a wider project to produce a series of maps covering the entirety of the Roman Empire, for which Crawford visited various parts of Europe during the late 1920s and 1930s. Holiday destinations included Germany, Austria, Romania, Corsica, Malta, Algeria, and Tunisia, and in 1936 he purchased a plot of land in Cyprus on which he had a house built. During these vacations, he visited archaeological sites and met with local archaeologists, encouraging them to contribute articles to Antiquity.
  Crawford believed that society would progress with the growth of internationalism and the increased application of science. Politically, he had moved toward socialism under the influence of Childe, who had become a close friend. He expressed the view that socialism was "the natural corollary of science in the regulation of human affairs". He attempted to incorporate Marxist ideas into his archaeological interpretations, as a result producing articles such as "The Dialectical Process in the History of Science", which was published in The Sociological Review. He became enthusiastic about the Soviet Union, a state governed by the Marxist Communist Party, viewing it as the forerunner of a future world state.
  With his friend Neil Hunter, he travelled to the Soviet Union in May 1932, sailing to Leningrad aboard the Smolny. Once there, they followed a prescribed tourist itinerary, visiting Moscow, Nizhni Novgorod, Stalingrad, Rostov-on-Don, Tiflis, Armenia, Batum, and Sukhum. Crawford admired what he perceived as the progress that the Soviet Union had made since the fall of the Tsarist regime, the increasingly classless and gender-equal status of its population, and the respect accorded to scientists in planning its societal development. He described his holiday with glowing praise in a book, A Tour of Bolshevy, stating that he did so to "hasten the downfall of capitalism" while at the same time making "as much money as possible" out of capitalists. The book was rejected by the publisher Victor Gollancz, after which Crawford decided not to approach other publishers, instead giving typed copies of the work to his friends. Although he became involved with the Friends of the Soviet Union and wrote several articles for the Daily Worker newspaper, he never joined the Communist Party of Great Britain, nor did he become involved in organised politics at all, perhaps fearing that to do so would jeopardise his employment in the civil service.
  In Britain, he photographed sites associated with the prominent Marxists Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. He also photographed the signs erected by landowners and religious groups, believing that in doing so he was documenting the traces of capitalist society before they would be swept away by socialism. Both in Britain and on a visit to Germany he photographed pro-fascist and anti-fascist propaganda and graffiti. Like many leftists at the time, he believed that fascism was a temporary, extreme expression of capitalist society that would soon be overcome by socialism. He nevertheless expressed admiration for the German archaeological establishment under the Nazi government, highlighting that the British state lagged far behind in terms of funding excavations and encouraging the study of archaeology in universities; he refrained from commenting on the political agenda that the Nazis had in promoting archaeology.
  Despite his socialist and pro-Soviet beliefs, Crawford believed in co
caption: In 1938, Crawford was guided around the Danevirke by German archaeologists.
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