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Hadrian's Wall: 1921–1930
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 September 2012
Extract
Ten years ago I had the honour of laying before this Society a paper in which I attempted to summarise the results of the work done up to that time on the problems of Hadrian's Wall. This work had been done almost exclusively by local antiquaries, amateurs in archaeology and unsupported by any organisation more powerful than their local antiquarian societies. Even when, as had sometimes happened, professional scholars took a hand in the work, they brought little to it but what they carried in their heads: little, I mean, of the aid which might have been given by the great universities and learned societies of the country. It needed an organised staff of trained workers; it needed funds on a scale permitting the systematic solution of problems as they arose; and it needed a method of publication by which its results could be presented to the learned world and, through the learned world, to the world at large. Ten years ago, in spite of the few professional scholars to whom I have referred, there was not even the nucleus of an expert staff; the bulk of the work remained where it had always been, in the hands of the amateur and the local antiquary. The funds employed to carry it on were almost entirely local, and were raised, in great part out of the pockets of the directors themselves, as special emergencies required. And the results were published, or, I might rather say, buried, in local transactions, where it was practically certain that no professional student of Roman history would see them.
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- Copyright ©R. G. Collingwood 1931. Exclusive Licence to Publish: The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies
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