‘Ocular Exploration, and Subterraneous Enquiry’: developing archaeological fieldwork in the mid-seventeenth century

Abstract

The middle decades of the seventeenth century are seen as a period when antiquaries were obsessed with heraldry and genealogy and paid little attention to physical antiquities. Through an exploration of a circle of antiquaries associated in the 1650s with John Aubrey, this paper argues that interest in physical monuments was indeed sustained and developed during this period of transition from Camden's Britannia to Aubrey's Monumenta Britannia. It is suggested that Aubrey's association with the Royal Society, a body that played an important role in preserving and disseminating archaeological evidence, has privileged one particular influence on the early development of archaeological fieldwork at the expense of others explored here. Indeed, this period is marked by a growing interest in physical evidence that was a natural next step for antiquaries who found themselves reaching the boundaries of what literary sources could tell them about the monuments they observed in the landscape.