Osbert Guy Stanhope Crawford CBE FBA FSA (28 October 1886 – 28 November 1957) was a British archaeologist who specialised in the archaeology of prehistoric Britain and Sudan.

Born in Bombay, British India, to a wealthy middle-class Scottish family, Crawford moved to England as an infant and was raised by his aunts in London and Hampshire.

Employed by the philanthropist Henry Wellcome, Crawford oversaw the excavation of Abu Geili in Sudan before returning to England shortly before the First World War.

After an injury forced a period of convalescence in England, he returned to the Western Front, where he was captured by the German Army in 1918 and held as a prisoner of war until the end of the conflict.

With the archaeologist Alexander Keiller, he conducted an aerial survey of many counties in southern England and raised the finances to secure the land around Stonehenge for The National Trust.

During the journey he was entrusted to the care of his paternal aunt Eleanor, an Anglican nun who was the head of the Poona Convent of the Community of St Mary the Virgin.

[11] At the school, Crawford was influenced by his housemaster, F. B. Malim, who presided over the archaeological section of the college's Natural History Society and encouraged the boy's interest in the subject.

[15] He began excavation of a barrow near to Bull's Copse, thus attracting the attention of the antiquarian Harold Peake, who was then involved in compiling the Victoria County History of Berkshire.

[44] During this time in England he spent a weekend at Wells's home in Dunmow, Essex, embracing the latter's desire for a united world government and the idea that writing about global history was a contribution to that cause.

[59] His job entailed correcting and updating information about archaeological monuments as the OS maps were revised, and involved him undertaking much fieldwork, travelling across the British landscape to check the location of previously recorded sites and discover new ones.

[66] In 1921, the Ordnance Survey published Crawford's work, "Notes on Archaeology for Guidance in the Field", in which he explained how amateur archaeologists could identify traces of old monuments, roads, and agricultural activity in the landscape.

[78] In 1927 Crawford and Keiller helped raise the finances to buy the land around Stonehenge and present it to The National Trust to prevent it from being damaged by further agricultural or urban development.

[85] It contained contributions from a variety of young archaeologists who came to dominate the field of British archaeology, among them V. Gordon Childe, Grahame Clark, Cyril Fox, Christopher Hawkes, T. D. Kendrick, Stuart Piggott, and Mortimer Wheeler.

[89] As well as seeking to shape and define the discipline, Antiquity sought to spread news of archaeological discoveries to a wider public, thereby being more accessible than pre-existing scholarly journals.

[93] Above all [Crawford] has shown what can be done by a combination of intensive field-work with methodical revision and interpretation, to build up a fabric of scientific knowledge out of scattered and inexpert observations, and literally to "put upon the map" the outlines of British prehistory.

[99] Holiday destinations included Germany, Austria, Romania, Corsica, Malta, Algeria, and Tunisia, and in 1936 he purchased a plot of land in Cyprus on which he had a house built.

[103] He attempted to incorporate Marxist ideas into his archaeological interpretations,[104] as a result producing articles such as "The Dialectical Process in the History of Science", which was published in The Sociological Review.

[107] Crawford admired what he perceived as the progress that the Soviet Union had made since the fall of the Tsarist regime, the increasingly classless and gender-equal status of its population, and the respect accorded to scientists in planning its societal development.

[108] He described his holiday with glowing praise in a book, A Tour of Bolshevy, stating that he did so to "hasten the downfall of capitalism" while at the same time making "as much money as possible" out of capitalists.

[120] Several of his photographs are used in the British Museum's display of Sutton Hoo artefacts, but he was not originally credited; this may be due to the lack of recognition for certain types of archaeological labour, such as photography.

[120] In the late 1930s he began work on a book titled Bloody Old Britain,[a] which he described as "an attempt to apply archaeological methods to the study of contemporary society" and in which he was heavily critical of his homeland.

[121] It examined 1930s Britain through its material culture, with Crawford reaching the judgement that it was a society in which appearances were given greater importance than value, with clothing, for instance, emphasising bourgeois respectability over comfort.

[122] The work fitted within an established genre of 1930s publications which lamented the state of British society, in particular the quality of its food and manufactured products as well as its increasing suburbanisation.

[135] At Nursling, he wrote a book on the northern Sudanese Funj Sultanate of Sennar,[144] which appeared in the same year as his long-delayed report on the Abu Geili excavation, co-written with Frank Addison.

[172] Bowden expressed the view that while Crawford "had a quick temper, which he strove to control ... he was essentially a friendly man",[173] adding that he could be "clubbable, hospitable and kind".

[180] The archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes commented that in Crawford's editorials for Antiquity, he directed "righteous indignation" toward "everybody from the State, Dominion and Colonial Governments, Universities and Museums, to tardy reviewers and careless proof-correctors".

"[182] Piggott described Crawford as a mentor who "was encouraging, helpful, and unconventional: his racy outspoken criticism of what then passed for the archaeological Establishment was music to a schoolboy's ear".

[162] Clark expressed the view that Crawford "always hankered to restore the flesh and blood and to make the past a reality to the living generation", and in doing so helped to attract a greater public audience for British archaeology than many of his colleagues.

[187] Commenting on Crawford's editorship of Antiquity, Hawkes expressed the view that his "skill in steering between over-simplification and over-specialization has enabled the Magazine to succeed admirably in its role as go-between for experts and public".

[174] Writing in Public Archaeology, Ascherson characterised it as "full of clever perception and sympathetic insight" but was critical of its lack of references and "occasional mistakes of fact".