Robin George Collingwood FBA (/ˈkɒlɪŋwʊd/; 22 February 1889 – 9 January 1943) was an English philosopher, historian and archaeologist.

Collingwood was born 22 February 1889 in Cartmel, Grange-over-Sands, then in Lancashire (now Cumbria), the son of the artist and archaeologist W.G.

He was educated at Rugby School and University College, Oxford, where he gained a First in Classical Moderations (Greek and Latin) in 1910 and a congratulatory First in Greats (Ancient History and Philosophy) in 1912.

Important influences on Collingwood were the Italian Idealists Benedetto Croce, Giovanni Gentile and Guido de Ruggiero, the last of whom was also a close friend.

It came to be a major inspiration for philosophy of history in the English-speaking world and is extensively cited, leading to an ironic remark by commentator Louis Mink that Collingwood is coming to be "the best known neglected thinker of our time".

[15] He accuses anthropologists of prejudice when analyzing the magical practices of previous generations, as they assumed that it must fulfill the same purpose of modern science.

[17] In politics Collingwood defended the ideals of what he called liberalism "in its Continental sense": The essence of this conception is ... the idea of a community as governing itself by fostering the free expression of all political opinions that take shape within it, and finding some means of reducing this multiplicity of opinions to a unity.

The family home was at Coniston in the Lake District and his father was a leading figure in the Cumberland and Westmorland Archaeological Society.

Collingwood was drawn in on a number of excavations and put forward the theory that Hadrian's Wall was not so much a fighting platform but an elevated sentry walk.

[20] He also put forward the suggestion that Hadrian's defensive system also included a number of forts along the Cumberland coast.

His final and most controversial excavation in Cumbria was that of a circular ring ditch near Penrith known as King Arthur's Round Table in 1937.

Sadly, his subsequent ill health prevented him undertaking a second season so the work was handed over to the German prehistorian Gerhard Bersu, who queried some of Collingwood's findings.

Mortimer Wheeler in a review,[22] remarked that "it seemed at first a trifle off beat that he should immerse himself in so much museum-like detail ... but I felt sure that this was incidental to his primary mission to organise his own thinking".

[23] The most notorious passage is that on Romano-British art: "the impression that constantly haunts the archaeologist, like a bad smell, is that of an ugliness that plagues the place like a London fog".

It is a philosophy which, as Anthony Birley points out,[25] has been incorporated by English Heritage into the conditions for Scheduled Monuments Consent.