Cyril Fox : Archaeologist Extraordinary

In this biography of Sir Cyril Fox, Charles Scott-Fox discovers that his father was an extraordinary man, a creative and wide-ranging scholar, an inspiring teacher, an effective administrator, a humanist, and an influential archaeologist during the golden years of 20th century archaeology.Fox left school at age 16 to become an apprentice at a nursery garden; he became interested in archaeology as a hobby, but within several years of entering Cambridge at the mature age of 36 he had become an internationally renowned scholar.

Fox's The Archaeology of the Cambridge Region (1923) revolutionised the study of British archaeology.

His innovation was to bring a geographical approach to the analysis of standard archaeological distribution maps, relating patterns of culture to the physical environment, and producing in his own words economic history. He developed the geographical approach in multiple editions of The Personality of Britain: its influence on inhabitant and invader in prehistoric and early historic times, and although many of the assumptions that Fox made about the environment were soon refuted as overly deterministic, this essay had a profound influence on both archaeological and geographical thought.

Fox soon moved from the university to the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff.

In parallel with the story of the man is the story of the museum, a cultural institution which had pretensions of serving a nation but which at the end of the First World War was literally bankrupt.

By the end of his term as Director in 1948 it had become a truly national museum, and had even produced a daughter museum at St Fagans to house the Folk collection that Fox had ardently nurtured throughout his period in office.