"Given the charge of the Archaeological Survey of India in 1944, when he was a brigadier in the British army fighting in North Africa, he revived the ASI and institutionalized a more rigorous stratigraphic method designed to record a site’s evolution period after period. Irascible but magnanimous, theatrical but hard-working, Wheeler energetically put his stamp on Indian archaeology. But having received his archaeological training in the context of the Roman Empire, he transferred its terminology wholesale to the Harappan cities, which thus became peppered with ‘citadels’, ‘granaries’, ‘colleges’, ‘defence walls’, etc., when no one, in reality, had a clue to the precise purpose of the massive structures that had emerged from the thick layers of accumulated mud."
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Fellows of the Royal SocietyAcademics from ScotlandPeople from GlasgowFellows of the British AcademyArchaeologists from Scotland
Original Language: English
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Sources
Danino, M. (2010). The lost river : on the trail of the Sarasvatī. Penguin Books India.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mortimer_Wheeler
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Mortimer Wheeler
Sir Robert Eric Mortimer Wheeler FRS FBA FSA (10 September 1890 – 22 July 1976) was a British archaeologist and officer in the British Army. Over the course of his career, he served as Director of both the National Museum of Wales and London Museum, Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India, and the founder and Honorary Director of the Institute of Archaeology in London, in addition to writing twenty-four books on archaeological subjects.
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