page_title: Leslie Grinsell
section_title: Life as a Professional Archaeologist: 1945–95
hierarchical_section_title: Leslie Grinsell / Biography / Life as a Professional Archaeologist: 1945–95
caption_attribution_description: English: Bush Barrow "In the 1720s William Stukeley had called it “the bush barrow” after trees planted on the top (though the “county people” knew it as “the green barrow”)" http://www.britarch.ac.uk/ba/ba104/feat1.shtml . "This very large bowl barrow in the Normanton Down barrow group, just south of Stonehenge, measures over 40m in diameter and stands today 3m high. It was excavated in 1808 by William Cunnington and Sir Richard Colt Hoare. The primary burial was of a tall, stout, adult man, buried lying on his back. The grave goods placed with him show that this was a princely burial from about 1900 -1700 B.C. It is Britain's richest and most important Bronze Age burial" http://www.wiltshireheritage.org.uk/galleries/index.php?Action=3&amp;obID=89&amp;prevID=9 . In the foreground is a round barrow. Together they form part of the Normanton Down Barrows. The first link gives much detail about the excavation of Bush Barrow and the site as a whole.
context_page_description: Leslie Valentine Grinsell OBE FSA was an English archaeologist and museum curator. Publishing over twenty books on archaeology during his lifetime, he was renowned as a specialist on the prehistoric barrows of southern England.
  Born in London and raised largely in Brighton, Grinsell developed an early interest in archaeology through visits to Brighton Museum. Later working as a bank clerk in London, he embarked on archaeological research in an amateur capacity, visiting prehistoric barrows during his weekends and holidays to record their shape, dimensions, and location. On the basis of his research, he published a range of academic articles and books on barrows during the 1930s, gaining recognition as Britain's foremost expert on the subject. In 1933, he carried out his only archaeological excavation, at the Devil's Humps in Sussex.
  During the Second World War he joined the Royal Air Force and served in Egypt, where he acquainted himself with the archaeological remains of Ancient Egyptian society; after the war he published a book on the Egyptian pyramids.
context_section_description: On returning to Britain, Grinsell went back to his job at Barclays Bank. In 1947 he was a Postgraduate Diploma of Prehistoric Archaeology student at the Institute of Archaeology (now part of UCL) at the University of London, in the same cohort as Sinclair Hood. That year he also became the treasurer of the Prehistoric Society, a position that he retained until 1970, during which he helped to secure the organisation's post-war reconstruction. In 1949 the archaeologist Christopher Hawkes invited Grinsell to join him and Stuart Piggott as a project assistant at Victoria County History in order to compile the Victoria County History of Wiltshire. Grinsell accepted, leaving his bank job and moving to the Wiltshire town of Devizes, thus becoming a professional archaeologist. Thomas later stated that the Victoria County History of Wiltshire "represents the high point in [Grinsell's] combined powers of fieldwork, grasp of secondary sources and handling of a great deal of detailed information." Grinsell later published the book The Archaeology of Wessex, which was based on his experience during this period.
  Leaving Devizes, in 1952 Grinsell became Keeper of Anthropology and Archaeology at Bristol City Museum, remaining there until his retirement in 1972. He also published a number of academic articles and book reviews. During his holidays he often visited the Mediterranean, where he examined various prehistoric tombs. He also continued pursuing his interest in barrows, and by the 1970s had also catalogued those examples in Dorset, Gloucestershire, Somerset, and Devon.
  Bristol University awarded him an honorary degree on the basis of his work, while he was appointed to the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1972. That same year a festschrift was issued in his honour, edited by Nichols Fowler. 
  In 1989, Grinsell published an autobiography; reviewing it for the Folklore journal, the historian Hilda Ellis Davidson praised it but noted that it does not "tell us very much about the inner life of the author".
  According to the archaeologist Paul Ashbee, Grinsell's "directness, whimsical humour and sound common sense were legendary, as were his walking, youth-hostelling and penchant for traditional afternoon teas of the cream variety." A bachelor, he never married.
caption: In the 1950s, Grinsell focused on the barrows of Wiltshire, such as Bush Barrow (pictured)
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