Obituary: George Holleyman

Submitted by PaulM on Wednesday, 10 November 2004 Page Views: 3414

Archaeologist whose meticulous excavations in Sussex laid bare the details of life in Bronze Age Britain - over more than half a century George Holleyman made a distinguished contribution to the archaeological study of the South Downs.

It is almost impossible to discuss the prehistory of lowland Britain without including his exemplary excavations at Plumpton Plain (1934) and Itford Hill (1949-53), which revolutionised our understanding of the British Bronze Age.

George Alfred Holleyman was born in 1910. His father worked for the Post Office. The family moved to Brighton in 1914, and he remained in Sussex, except for war service, for the rest of his life. Holleyman attended Christchurch School, Brighton, and Brighton Technical College.

He did not go to university, but his early interest in the past was fostered by Herbert Toms, curator of Brighton Museum, and the Doctors Curwen, father and son, both archaeologists. Toms was Lieutenant-General Augustus Pitt-Rivers’s righthand man in the field during his pioneering excavations in Cranborne Chase in Dorset in the 1880s. Here Pitt-Rivers, very much with Toms, developed a rigorous excavation style based on stratigraphic principles, and Toms passed these on to George Holleyman. This approach remains the basis of scientific excavation worldwide today.

In addition to excavation techniques, Toms taught Holleyman the importance of field survey and landscape archaeology, which led him into contact with the respected archaeological surveyor and illustrator Robert Gurd who later illustrated many of Holleyman’s publications.

Holleyman’s interest in landscape archaeology, and particularly the use of the newly developed techniques of aerial survey, were well demonstrated in his classic paper The Celtic Field System in Southern Britain, published in Antiquity (1935). Here he integrated aerial and terrestrial survey to show the intensity of agricultural activity on the South Downs, particularly north of Brighton, during the late Iron Age and Romano-British periods.

Holleyman, like many archaeologists of his generation, found that his skills in archaeological interpretation of aerial photographs could be applied to military ends. He was commissioned as a flight lieutenant in the RAF during the Second World War. He became a photographic interpretation officer in the Central Interpretation Unit at RAF Medmenham. His last job in the RAF was as librarian in charge of some seven million images produced by both the RAF and USAAF worldwide.

After the war Holleyman set up an antiquarian bookshop, Holleyman and Treacher, in Brighton (Treacher withdrew after the first year). The shop gradually acquired a high reputation as Holleyman assembled the largest collection of antiquarian books in southeast England. He bought the library of the estate of Leonard and Virginia Woolf, and he regularly located rare books for the Bodleian, British Museum and Eton College libraries.

But archaeology was his consuming enthusiasm. Although he excavated and published a wide range of downland sites, including the late Bronze Age hillfort on Harrow Hill, an Iron Age settlement at Muntham Court and the Romano-British village at Highdole Hill, it is his work on later Bronze Age downland archaeology for which he will be best remembered.

The fieldwork at Plumpton Plain, although nominally a joint project with Dr E. C. Curwen, was almost entirely directed by Holleyman (Curwen claiming in the report to be only a “sleeping partner”). The title of the publication, Late Bronze Age Lynchet-Settlements on Plumpton Plain, Sussex, in the second volume of the Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, emphasised the importance of placing settlements in their landscape context, something which few archaeologists were doing at the time.

The excavation of a late Bronze Age settlement on Itford Hill, Sussex, is George Holleyman’s lasting memorial. Itford Hill was a remarkably well-preserved group of settlement enclosures set in a network of lyncheted fields which had survived almost unchanged since they had been deserted about 1100BC. For the first time on such a site whole enclosures with their fence-lines and ponds were excavated to reveal later Bronze Age life in minute detail.

Holleyman recognised the importance of local archaeological societies. He joined the Brighton and Hove Archaeological Society in 1929, served as its president in 1947-49 and vice-president until his death. This society, one of the most active on the South Coast, sponsored most of his excavation work. In 1946 he joined the Sussex Archaeological Society, serving on its council from 1948 to 1984 and then again as a vice-president until his death.

This was a crucial time for the society during which it became — as it remains today — one of the most active, successful and indeed largest county archaeological societies in Britain. In 1947 he was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London. He was also closely involved in publishing history serving as chairman of the Sussex Record Society from 1974-1991 and then as its vice-president.

It was however as a prehistoric archaeologist striding up to visit excavations on the South Downs in the 1970s and 1980s, and freely offering of his extensive knowledge, that archaeologists will remember him.

Holleyman is survived by one daughter from his marriage to Nellie Rose Sibley. His partner for more than 50 years, Gina Koester, died in 2003.

George Holleyman, archaeologist and antiquarian bookseller, was born on December 10, 1910. He died on October 2, 2004, aged 93.

Source: The Times November 2004

Contributor Bio for PaulM: Based in Macclesfield, contributing since 2002. Favourite site: Hordron Edge. Occupation: Something in waste and recycling.

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