The Life of T.E. Lawrence (Home)

In the actual work he was curiously erratic. It all depended on how far he was interested, and not everything in field archaeology did interest him or appeal to his sense of values. He could take very full and careful notes, not always in a form easy for others to follow, but giving all the gist of the matter, and at other times he would takes no notes at all. Once I asked him to write a detailed description of a row of sculptured slabs and he duly handed in a notebook which he said contained all that was wanted; long afterwards when I came to look at it I found that each slab was dismissed with a sentence or two which merely made fun of it. Probably he thought that a description was a waste of time  – he would himself have much preferred a good photograph; anyhow it could just as well be written later, and the instruction to do a distasteful job gave an opening for the impish humour that was so prominent in him. His impatience of the written record might have been due in part to his prodigious memory. He would look at a small fragment of a Hittite inscription which had just come to light and remark that it fitted on to an equally small piece found twelves months before, and although there were many hundreds of such in our store-room he was always right; or he would quote from memory a particular potsherd that had been found in a former season and could describe its stratum and associations, although I and not he had excavated the piece and written the notes about it. His mind was indeed entirely set on the work he was doing, but he did it in his own way. He would make a brilliant suggestion but would seldom argue in support of them; they were based on sound enough arguments, but he expected you to see those for yourself, and if you did not agree he would relapse into silence and smile.

-Sir. C. Leonard Woolley on T.E. Lawrence

The photo shows Lawrence and Woolley at their dig site in Carchmeish, around 1912-1913.