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Accidents of an antiquary's life

Chapter 2: PREFACE
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About This Book

The author recounts travels and fieldwork across classical Mediterranean and Near Eastern landscapes, blending vivid site descriptions with accounts of excavations, logistical difficulties, and personal mishaps. Chapters move between coastal and inland ruins, fens, and valleys, offering observations on monuments, local customs, companions, and the practical methods of surveying and digging. Interspersed are reflections on scholarly apprenticeship and episodic adventures, accompanied by photographic illustrations that record both discoveries and the daily challenges of exploring ancient sites.

GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD.

PREFACE

Among many companions in these accidents who are not named in the text, lest the book should become a string of names, I have to thank five especially because they have allowed me to use photographs taken when we were together. These are Mr. Alison V. Armour, owner of the “Utowana,” Mr. Richard Norton, a comrade during the cruise of that yacht and at Siut and in Syria, Messrs. A. W. Van Buren and C. D. Curtis, members of the yachting party, and Mr. J. A. R. Munro, who endured many things with me in Asia Minor in 1891. Four others, Dr. A. C. Headlam, who was the third of Sir W. M. Ramsay’s party in 1890, Mr. B. Christian, my companion in Thessaly before the Graeco-Turkish war broke out, Mr. J. G. C. Anderson, who cruised with me to Lycia in 1897, and Mr. A. E. Henderson, who did loyal service at Ephesus, I cannot forbear to name. I have also to express thanks to the proprietors and editors of three magazines, the Monthly, Cornhill, and Macmillan’s, for their kind consent to my using, in five chapters of this book, the second to the sixth, parts of articles which appeared in their issues prior to 1905. Finally, my friend and critic, Charles Robert Leslie Fletcher, who read this book in proof, knows how greatly I am beholden to him.

D. G. H.

Oxford, 1909.