Person · archaeologist · United Kingdom
Alexander Cunningham
A Bengal Engineers officer who surveyed, dug and catalogued Indian monuments for forty years and became the first Director-General of the Archaeological Survey in 1871 — identifying Sanchi, Bharhut, Sarnath, Taxila and much else, and following Xuanzang's itinerary on the ground to locate the Buddhist sites.
- Date
- 1814–1893
- Function
- Archaeology & heritage
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 22.558, 88.351
Worth knowing
He is also part of why so much moved: his excavations sent sculpture to Calcutta and London, the Bharhut railings went to the Indian Museum, and his methods were those of his generation. The Survey he founded is the body that now prosecutes the removal of antiquities, which is a useful measure of how much the discipline changed.
About the place
Placed at Calcutta, where the Archaeological Survey he founded had its headquarters and where much of what he excavated was deposited in the Indian Museum.
Connections (3)
- Traveller routeXuanzang
Cunningham used Xuanzang's seventh-century itinerary as a field guide, matching the Chinese monk's recorded distances and directions against the ground to locate Sravasti, Sankisa, Kaushambi, Nalanda and much else — a method that worked because Xuanzang had been unusually careful about li and about which way he turned. Most of the Buddhist sites now on the map were found by reading a traveller's account with a theodolite, and the identifications have largely held.
- Excavation of siteSānchī
Sanchi had already been badly damaged by amateur treasure-hunting — a shaft driven into the great stupa in 1822, a gateway sold off — when Cunningham surveyed and published it in 1854; Marshall's proper conservation came sixty years later. Between them the two men are the before and after of Indian archaeology: one recording and removing, the other stabilising and leaving in place, and the site shows both phases plainly.
- Monument relocationBodh Gayā / Mahābodhi Temple
The Mahabodhi temple at Bodh Gaya as it now stands is substantially a restoration of the 1880s carried out under Cunningham and Beglar, using as its guide a thirteenth-century Burmese-funded repair and a model brought from Bagan — so the building is a Victorian reconstruction of a medieval Burmese reconstruction of a Gupta original. Which of those three it is a monument to has never been settled.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Alexander Cunningham”. Alexander Cunningham’s Archaeological Survey of India Reports (1871–87); the Archaeological Survey’s conservation files.
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