Victorian gentlemen opened ancient burial mounds as weekend sport, sometimes several in a day — Derbyshire's Thomas Bateman recorded opening hundreds in his 1861 book Ten Years' Diggings, digging fast for urns and skeletons and leaving little record of the layers. As excavation standards professionalized around 1900, barrow-digging was reclassified from respectable pastime to destruction; its surviving descendant, responsible metal-detecting, now reports finds through schemes like England's Portable Antiquities Scheme.
Barrow-digger no longer exists as a living trade. Here is what erased it, and which profession took on the work.
c. 550 BCE – 1748
Kings, relic hunters and antiquarians
Curiosity about the buried past long predates any method for satisfying it. Nabonidus dug for royal inscriptions in Babylonia; Renaissance popes and princes mined Rome for statuary; Ming and Song dynasty scholars in China catalogued ancient bronzes and inscriptions in a parallel antiquarian tradition. In Enlightenment Europe, gentlemen on the Grand Tour bought antiquities by the crate, and societies like London's Society of Antiquaries (founded 1707) began treating old objects as evidence — though almost nobody yet recorded where anything had actually come from.
What else was happening then
1748
Pompeii excavations begin
Under Charles of Bourbon, king of Naples, workmen began digging into Pompeii, ten years after tunneling started at neighboring Herculaneum. The work was closer to royal treasure-mining than science — statues and frescoes went straight to the palace — but two buried Roman cities made the deep past a European obsession and, eventually, a laboratory for method.
1822
Champollion deciphers hieroglyphs
Using the Rosetta Stone's parallel Greek, demotic and hieroglyphic texts — found by French soldiers at Rashid in 1799 — Jean-François Champollion announced his decipherment of ancient Egyptian in his Lettre à M. Dacier. Egypt's own written history opened, and excavation in the Nile valley acquired a reading public across Europe.
1836
Thomsen publishes the Three-Age System
Christian Jürgensen Thomsen, curator of the Danish national collection in Copenhagen, published his guidebook sorting prehistoric artifacts into successive ages of stone, bronze and iron. The Three-Age System gave prehistory its first workable chronology — built by ordering objects and their find contexts, not by trusting ancient texts.
1873
Schliemann's treasure at Troy
Digging a massive trench through the mound of Hisarlik in Ottoman Turkey, Heinrich Schliemann unearthed a hoard of gold and silver he named "Priam's Treasure" and declared Homer's Troy found. He was roughly right about the place and wrong about the layer — his trench destroyed much of the city of Homer's era — and his methods became the cautionary tale the next generation defined itself against.
Where that work lives now
The scientist who reads human history out of the ground, one unrepeatable layer at a time — from Nabonidus's temple trenches to LiDAR and ancient DNA.
🏺 Archaeologist →