John Aubrey, England's first archeologist, was born in Kingston, England in 1626. From childhood he had a love for history and antiquities. At the age of sixteen he entered Trinity College at Oxford University. He attended Trinity college intermittently over the next few years as his education was interrupted by civil war and illness. When he was 22 his father became ill and he returned home to look after his father’s business. A few weeks later he was hunting near the village of Avebury with his friends when he found "Downs sown with great Stones” which had long been ignored. This discovery of Stonehenge was Aubrey's greatest contribution to archeology.
Aubrey inherited his father’s estate, but quickly squandered it as he pursued intellectual endeavors. He wrote on many subjects, but rarely finished anything. However, his work was appreciated by his circle of intellectual friends, including John Locke and Isaac Newton. By 1662 he had a well-established reputation as an antiquarian and was nominated as one of the Original Fellows of the Royal Society at Oxford.
He returned to Stonehenge in 1663 at the King’s command to conduct a detailed survey and compose a discourse on his findings. He speculated that Stonehenge was a temple of the Druids. He documented depressions in the ground known as “Aubrey’s Holes” which were located and excavated in 1921 and were found to contain cremated remains.
A lot of Aubrey’s ideas were ahead of his time. He speculated, “That the world is much older than is commonly supposed, any man may be induced to believe from the finding Fossils so many Foot deep in the Earth.” He even foreshadowed the concept of evolution in his statement “that Fishes are of the elder House.” Some of his more well-known works include Lives of Eminent Men, which was not published until 1823, and Brief Lives, his observations on the lives of the famous men he associated with including Francis Bacon, René Descartes, and William Shakespeare.
Dick, Oliver Lawon
1957 "Aubrey's Brief Lives: Edited from the Original Manuscripts and with a Life of John Subrey by
Oliver Lawson Dick." The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.
Written By: Melissa Lorentz, 2008