William Hawley

Lieutenant colonel William Hawley (1851–1941) was a British archaeologist who undertook pioneering excavations at Stonehenge.

[3] Along with William Henry St John Hope and Duncan Hector Montgomerie, Hawley participated in the first major excavations of the Old Sarum hillfort between 1909 and 1915.

They were primarily concerned with the danger of falling stones, but funds were made available for Hawley to continue his investigations long after the righting work was finished.

Hawley proved, from a thin stratum of stone chip debris he called the Stonehenge Layer, that the earthwork features, the Aubrey Holes and some of the other postholes and burials constituted earlier phases of activity that predated the erection of the megaliths.

Hawley's model of a multiphase site did not agree with the contemporary interpretation and was ignored until Richard Atkinson revived the idea in the 1950s.