Sir Charles Newton was an innovator and leader in early archaeology. He was one of the first scholars to argue that the study of material remains is as important as historical texts to understanding the past.

He was passionate about Greek and Roman history and in the early 1850s, whilst working for the British Museum, was sponsored by the British Foreign Office to travel around Turkey and the Dodecanese (then under Turkish control). His brief was to find and record antiquities and send them back for the museum’s collection.
 
Newton went to Kalymnos - ‘an obscure and barren spot almost unnoticed by ancient writers and little known to modern travellers’- because gold grave ornaments had been found there. At the ruined Temple of Apollo, he hired workers and excavated, sketched and recorded, concluding from the artefacts and remains that the temple was important in the ancient world.
 
Newton's writing also comments on Kalymnos life, from the sponge divers, away working for half the year, to a mayor who terrorised the population, and from undernourished girls who became wives and mothers in their early teens to women doing heavy manual labour.

After he returned from his travels, Newton became the founding director of the Greek and Roman Department at the British Museum.

By the time of his death in 1894, he had helped to found the British School of Archaeology in Athens and the British Hellenic Society and was described as the recognised head of Classical archaeology in Britain.

During his time in south west Turkey, Newton made the major discovery of the ancient site of Halicarnassus (now in the town of Bodrum). A room in the British Museum is devoted to his work there and displays some of the monumental statues and architecture he found.

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