science · 23 January 1814 · 210 years ago
birth
Born 23 Jan 1814; died 28 Nov 1893 at age 79.
British army officer and archaeologist who excavated many sites in India, including Sarnath and Sanchi. He retired (1861) as a major general after 30 years of service with the Bengal engineers and then was the first director (1861–65, 1870–85) of the Indian Archaeological Survey. In the 13th century, India's flourishing network of temples and monasteries was wiped out by invading armies, overgrown by forests, buried in humus, and forgotten. When Cunningham made it his mission to locate and dig them up again, in many cases all he had to go on were the accounts written by Fa Hien and Huien Tsiang and the occasional tip of an Ashokan pillar protruding from the earth. He wrote about the tradition of Kangra plastic surgery operations.
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