| Honorific Prefix: | Sir |
| John Marshall | |
| Birth Date: | 19 March 1876 |
| Birth Place: | Chester, Cheshire, England |
| Death Place: | Guildford, Surrey, England |
| Field: | History, archaeology |
| Work Institutions: | Archaeological Survey of India |
| Alma Mater: | King's College, Cambridge |
| Known For: | Excavations in Harappa, Mohenjodaro, Sanchi, Sarnath, Taxila, Crete, and Knossos |
| Prizes: | CIE Knighthood FBA |
Sir John Hubert Marshall (19 March 1876, Chester, England - 17 August 1958, Guildford, England) was an English archaeologist who was Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India from 1902 to 1928.[1] He oversaw the excavations of Harappa and Mohenjo Daro, two of the main cities that comprise the Indus Valley Civilisation.
Marshall was at school at Dulwich College before King's College, Cambridge, where in 1898 he won the Porson Prize.[2] He then trained in archaeology at Knossos under Sir Arthur Evans, who was rediscovering the Bronze Age Minoan civilization.[3] Under the sponsorship of the British School in Athens, where he attended from 1898 to 1901, he participated in excavations.[4]
In 1902, the new viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, appointed Marshall as Director-General of Archaeology within the British Indian administration. Marshall modernised the approach to archaeology on that continent, introducing a programme of cataloguing and conservation of ancient monuments and artifacts.[5]
Marshall began the practice of allowing Indians to train as archaeologists and supervise excavation.[6] Most of his students were Indian, and so, Marshall gained a reputation for being very sympathetic to Indian nationalism. Marshall agreed with Indian civic leaders and protesters who wanted more self-government, or even independence for India. Marshall was highly admired by Indians during the time he worked in India. In 1913, he began the excavations at Taxila, which lasted for 21 years.[7] In 1918, he laid the foundation stone for the Taxila Museum, which today hosts many artifacts and one of Marshall's few portraits. He then moved on to other sites, including the Buddhist centres of Sanchi and Sarnath.
His work provided evidence of the antiquity of Indian civilisation, particularly that of the Indus Valley civilization and the Mauryan age (Ashoka's Age). In 1920, Marshall initiated at dig at Harappa with Daya Ram Sahni as director. Mohenjodaro was discovered by R. D. Banerji in 1921, and in 1922, work began there.
After his appointment, Marshall engaged in constant resource disputes with the Indian government because he felt that the Archaeological Survey of India needed to be revived and that Indian archaeology needed to be overhauled.[8] By using the big finds in 1923 to gain more funding, he avoided a large budget decrease in 1922–1923 that would have endangered excavations at Harappa and Mohenjo-daro.
The results of these efforts, which revealed an ancient culture with its own writing system, were published in the Illustrated London News on 20 September 1924.[9] Scholars linked the artifacts with the ancient civilisation of Sumer in Mesopotamia. Subsequent excavation showed Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro to be sophisticated planned cities with plumbing and baths.[10] But Marshall ignored the stratigraphy of the site, and excavated along regular horizontal lines. This mixed up the artifacts from different stratigraphic layers, causing much valuable information about the context of his findings to be lost forever. This mistake was corrected by Mortimer (R. E. M.) Wheeler, who recognised that it was necessary to follow the stratigraphy of the mound rather than dig mechanically along uniform horizontal lines. Also a military precision was brought to archeology by Wheeler.[11]
Marshall also led excavations at the prehistoric Sohr Damb mound near Nal in Baluchistan; a small representative collection of pottery vessels from the site is now in the British Museum.[12]
Marshall retired from his post in 1934 and then departed India. He died on 17 August 1958, at his home in Guildford, Surrey, some 28 miles southwest of London.[13] [14]
Marshall was appointed a Companion of the Order of the Indian Empire (CIE) in June 1910[15] and knighted in January 1914.[16] He was awarded an honorary degree, Doctor of Philosophy, by Calcutta University in 1921.[17] He was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy in 1936.
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