A Bone to Pick: Interview with Paul Halstead
Back in the old days, when we had to ride our bikes to site.... In the trenches with Moshe Dayan Robin Dennell vs the KGB Undergraduate studies at Cambridge and the death of David Clarke Peter, Paul & Glynis (et al.) (a Greek Peter, Paul & Mary) The 'coggie' playgroup The naked truth about Mike (and other aspects of friendship at Cambridge) The processualist/post- processualist controversy The future of archaeology Paul's PhD research Working at Sheffield Last orders, last words
The interlocutors were Michael Lane (MFL), Paul Halstead (PH), Mel Giles (MCG), and John Barrett (JCB).
Back in the old days, when we had to ride our bikes to site....
MFL: This started as a sequel to the interview with Mike Parker Pearson in issue 2 of assemblage. Your name and Glynis's name came up many times -- in the best of contexts -- in that interview. So we thought we'd ask you for your side of the many stories that he told, and also to share with us some of your experiences as an archaeologist and an intellectual, and as a former postgraduate student. I suppose we could start with some general background: I don't have any idea where you grew up, where you went to school, and when you first decided to become an archaeologist.
PH: Until I was about ten, I moved around quite a lot, because my parents moved around. All of my secondary-school education was around Birmingham. How I got into archaeology was that at school I did Classics -- Latin and ancient Gr eek -- I got through Homer, got very interested in Greek Bronze Age archaeology, and because of that, I wanted to go and dig in Greece. When I finished at school, I wrote off to various digs in Greece, but no one would take me; they said I needed experience, which would be a very laudable thing to do. Because of that, I started digging in Britain. So I took a year off between school and university and spent most of that period digging on mostly Roman and medieval sites around England.
MCG: Did you work on any of the big urban digs at all? What were you working on? Were they smaller sites, rural sites?
PH: It's so long ago, I can barely remember. The first dig I went on was the Roman fort at Wall [Staffordshire], on the A5.
MFL: That was my next question.
PH: I used to cycle there every Saturday. It was being dug by a group of amateurs -- which was brilliant. We used to trowel away the whole day and find one little piece of pottery, which in retrospect seems rather unproductive.
MFL: By amateurs, do you mean a local society?
PH: Yeah, a local society. They were good. I think one of the things that has remained with me since then is that, although the academic goals of what they were doing may not have been that well thought out, the care that they took over excavation is something that I have very rarely seen. They were professional archaeologists. But I dug in Birmingham, in one of the forts -- under one of the university car parks, as it is now. Urban archaeology? I dug in Gloucester -- it's supposed to be the Roman town of Glevum -- a long, long time ago, before I went to university.
MFL: How was local archaeology conducted back then, compared to how it's done now with all the heritage management laws in place?
PH: I'm not sure I took that much interest at the time in the structure of what was going on, but the big difference from now is that there were loads of excavations going on every summer. It was very easy to get excavation experience. People advertised for so many volunteers, and they paid you a very small sum which would cover your food. And you slept on the floor in your sleeping bag or camp bed. It was great because it was very easy to get lots of experience, and I think that it's much, much harder now.
MCG: I think that's the big change with some local society excavation, which tends to be almost on the back of some other projects, semi- liaison with university, or museum experience. There's not that private individual's urge to get a site and work on it for years and years. It just isn't allowed to go on any more.
PH: Some of the things I worked on were rescue digs like the things Trevor Rowley ran on the new car park at Birmingham University.
MFL: What exactly was that?
PH: It was a Roman fort -- eventually. We trowelled around a ditch for a couple of summers.
MFL: Can you remember what your first dig experience was like? Were you immediately impressed with field work?
PH: Oh, I loved it, actually, yes! I really liked trowelling and trying to find features and things like that. It was really different from school education, which is entirely book-based, and then suddenly you're exposed to a lifestyle that is largely outdoors. I thought it was brilliant. That's why I went on to do archaeology, because I had a place to go do Classics at Cambridge, and after spending year digging, I had this vision of sitting in the library in front of the lexicon for three years. It seemed an awful idea. I went to my tutor who'd been responsible for Classics, which was what I was going in to, and explained this doubt about doing Classics. So he said to me, 'Well, what do you really like in Classics?' and I said, 'Homer'. And he said, 'What have you read?' I said, 'The Iliad and The Odyssey'. He said, 'There's not actually anything else!' Although that's obviously true, it hadn't actually struck me quite with that clarity before, and at that point I just decided to switch. My plan had been to do Classics and do Classical Archaeology back to back. You could not do very much of it. So at that point, I decided I was going to switch and do archaeology. MFL: Your degree at Cambridge was in what exactly?
PH: It was called Archaeology and Anthropology, which meant that in the first year you did social anthropology, physical anthropology, and archaeology. Then, at the end of the first year, you chose, and I chose to do archaeology. You chose -- so you were 'streamed' by periods. You could do Palaeolithic, Neolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age -- you could do Anglo-Saxon and something else I don't remember. I decided to do Neolithic, Bronze Age, and Iron Age.
MFL: When was this?
PH: I went there in 1970.
MFL: Which college did you attend at Cambridge?
PH: Magdalen, which was a curious choice. I went to a school which sent quite a lot of people to 'Ox-bridge'. It worked on the basis that those of us who were doing Classics -- they just sort of spread us around -- and I don't know why I was sent to Magdalen. It was a very, very curious college in those days. It mainly took public school boys; there were hundreds of Harrovians, Etonians, Marlburians, and people from Rugby, whatever they're called, many of whom would simply not get into a reputable university, and they ended up there. It was a really rude shock for the first few days to find yourself surrounded by people who had their own packs of hounds. I didn't even know people like that existed.
MCG: Did you enjoy it, or did you find it difficult?
PH: At first, I found the atmosphere at Magdalen thoroughly oppressive; it was a sort of society I was completely unused to. When I went to the dinner for all the new students, I was one of only two who wasn't wearing a dinner jacket. I'd never owned a dinner jacket. I'd seen one once before in my life. Absolute shock.
MFL: Was there still much ceremony in everything at Cambridge at that time? PH: Oh, yes. Certainly Magdalen was famous for the fact that the hall where formal dinner happened didn't have any electricity. It was all candlelit. It was an oppressive place to be.
MFL: How did you adjust?
PH: Well, basically, I adjusted at first because I had lots of friends from school at other colleges, and I simply ignored all of this, but eventually I found people in the same position as me. There were actually a lot of us, but because we were less obvious than the upper-class twits with their packs of hounds, we didn't immediately recognise or identify these people. Gradually, we got to meet each other, and then it became much more friendly. And in fact, in the end, I think it was a very salutary experience, because the lesson it taught me was that the snobbery works two ways. My reaction to these public-school boys was simply that I didn't want to know. I treated them all with equal loathing, and in fact, many of them were very nice. I think by my third year I actually began to realise that, in a curious way, snobbery works in both directions. As well as people like me being looked down upon by my peers, I was very unfairly ostracising a lot of them. Amongst them were some very nice people, some of whom were actually, in an interesting way, victims of that system, in the sense that they had been pushed into educational situations they couldn't cope with. Some of them the very introspective ones, actually found that very distressing.
* * * n the trenches with Moshe Dayan
PH: I should tell you first about what it was like as an undergraduate, because that's vaguely interesting. Because I was at Magdalen and wanted to switch to archaeology, I got sent off to meet the director of studies for archaeology at Magdalen, which was Higgs. So I was dispatched to see him before I ever went up. I had to go to his house. He lived in this house on Panton Street right below the university, and he had an office in the basement. I got shown down there. It was very dark and dingy -- very atmospheric, in a way -- and there was this bent old man down in this dingy basement. He said he might just be able to 'squeeze' me onto one of his field projects; that was the way he put it. I was very grateful, because I got the very clear understanding that I was very lucky to get into one of his projects. So the year before I went up, I went to dig in Israel with Tony Legge.
MFL: Which dig was that?
PH: I first went to Tel Gezer, which was being dug by a big American project. I was only there a few days, but it was quite an interesting site, because there was a huge American excavation going on and a little Cambridge team under Legge who were digging what Flannery later called a 'telephone booth' through the site. They were sieving it to get seeds and bones out. There was a very clear commando mentality. Whereas the Americans dug something sensible, like 8.00 to 1.00, the Cambridge team would work 6.00 to 6.00, or something stupid. Whereas they had Palestinian workmen who picked everything while they watched, we dug everything with handpicks and trowels. It was much more intensive excavation; we worked twice as long hours, and everyone felt very superior. It was quite interesting the way that Flannery very successfully caricatured that sort of stupid idea of a 'telephone booth' through a site which somehow is going to give you a subsistence picture.
MFL: I didn't mean to distract you from your story about Higgs.
PH: Well, a few minutes before I got to this site, it had a visit by Moshe Dayan, who was a renowned antiquities thief. He showed up with a jeep full of paratroops, or whatever they were, with Uzi sub-machine guns.
MFL: Is this when he was still Defence Minister?
PH: When he was Defence Minister, and two years after the Six Day War. The Cambridge team had a girl of probably 18, and she'd been sending cards back to her family of the black-eyepatched hero of the Six Day War, but when he walked into the kitchen, she didn't recognise him.
[Laughter] She walked into the kitchen, and she was in a bad mood. This site had an intercom, and so she's been screaming down the intercom 'Tony, there's some bastard with a black eyepatch up here!'
[Laughter]
Everyone realised who it was, and they pulled all the ladders out of the trenches. They ran up to the kitchen, because she sounded very distressed, in time to see her chasing Moshe Dayan and his bodyguards across the area in front of the kitchen, with a rolling pin or a wooden spoon or something. They basically ran away; they drove off in their jeep. So, by the time I arrived, walking up the hill with my rucksack about an hour later, everyone was in a high state of excitement. Anyway, I spent most of the time in the site of Nahal Oren, which is a sort of cave site with an open area in front of it, and we were digging basically Upper Palaeolithic-Natufian and Pre-Pottery Neolithic holes. The same old story: we were looking for seeds and bones.
MFL: It's a classic site, really.
PH: A classic site, yeah. I suppose the most interesting thing about it, really, was the way it was run; it was run on a complete shoestring. I mean, Legge had some derisory sum of money to run the whole thing on. We got terribly hungry. It seems very funny in retrospect, but we used to sit around at night, and people would tell stories about meals they'd been taken to by their parents. What in normal circumstances would be very boring subject of conversation -- everyone sat there riveted! We all had these running sores. If you cut yourself digging or got mosquito bites, they'd go septic and run. They'd never heal. When I eventually got back to England, I went to see the doctor because these things wouldn't heal. He said, 'They're classic malnutrition sores'.
MCG: How long were you there for?
PH: I was there six weeks, but some of them had been there three months, probably.
MCG: That must have really coloured your opinion of why you were there. PH: It's not that any of us thought it was odd. One can see with the benefit of hindsight that it was odd. The fact that we were all talking about meals that we'd been to in the past shows that one found it uncomfortable at the time. We worked incredibly long hours; we got up at 4.30 in the morning. I remember that we had eggs once a week, and on two occasions we got up in the morning to find that the mongoose had eaten them in the night. That was like a serious disaster: your one weekly egg was a real treat.
MFL: When you're young, you're more resilient, so it doesn't seem so bad.
PH: That was sort of like a baptism by fire, working on Higgs's projects. I could go on to tell you about by next experience with a Higgs project, because it's good.... If you had Higgs as a director of studies, you got dispatched to one of his PhD students to get your first-year tutorial, and I was sent off to Tony Legge. Higgs had this sort of little rabbit warren on the ground floor of the department, where people were crammed into tiny nooks and crannies. So the amount of space they had makes your surroundings look absolutely palatial. People would be studying big bone and seed assemblages on a table this big, which might be shared between two people.
MFL: Something less than four feet long!
PH: Yes, tiny. Legge and Dennell had desks, obviously. All my archaeology teaching was done by Tony Legge. Basically, the Cambridge system then at least, and probably is now, was tutorial- driven. So the lectures were pretty irrelevant -- most of them were bad - - and it didn't really matter because you got really good small-group teaching -- groups of two or three with postgrads [graduate students] who were really on the ball, really keen.
MFL: Could you explain that a bit more -- the distinction between the lectures and the tutorials -- and why the lectures were bad and how the tutorials were better?
PH: Well, I suppose the first thing is that our lectures would be in a class of 120. Archaeology, of course, was very popular. There were 120 people in our year, the first year. So a huge lecture theatre. But a lot of the older lecturers were really as dry as dust. Some of the younger ones were organised and keen, but at the end of the day, they couldn't really compete with small group tutorials. I mean, we were thrown in the deep end; Tony Legge had us in the first month reading Palaeolithic site reports in French. I'm not entirely sure about the wisdom of that, but you were vastly more engaged in what you were doing, doing that rather than hearing very general lectures.
MFL: And challenged to apply your intellect.
PH: Yes, well, probably.
[Laughter]
* * *
Undergraduate studies at Cambridge and the death of David Clarke
PH: Let me tell you something about the atmosphere when I was an undergraduate, because I think this explains a lot about Cambridge. At that time, the department was sort of riven between two factions: there was the flint typology faction under McBurney and the bone and seed faction under Higgs, and we didn't have the option of having a foot in both camps. There was a very, very factional atmosphere, in which students were made to feel very clearly that they had to belong to one camp or another.
MFL: Did you feel as if you were apprenticed to a professor almost?
PH: Yes. Higgs, as director of studies, made it very clear that he expected you to do things that he approved of, so at the end of our second year, when we had to choose which period we did, we were basically told to do the Palaeolithic. He was very difficult about me and Peter Rowley-Conwy wanting to do the Neolithic, Bronze Age, and Iron Age, because that wasn't taught by his people basically. I can't vouch how true it is, but it was absolutely an article of faith amongst all of the postgrads and the older students from the undergraduates that your degree outcome depended very much on which faction was chairing the exams board that year. Everybody believed that McBurney would shaft Higgs's protégés and vice versa. It was an interesting atmosphere. Anyway, while we were in Bulgaria, we met Andrew Sherratt, who was visiting Dennell, and who used to share a house with him. What he was doing really appealed to me and Peter, amongst others, so we ended up -- really over Higgs's dead body -- doing the Neolithic-Bronze-Iron option in the second year. We were primarily taught by Andrew Sherratt in the second year, which was absolutely brilliant. Our best ever tutorial, which the three of us used to go to together: me, Peter, and Colin Ridler, who now is the archaeology editor at Thames and Hudson. We used to go and wake him up in the morning about 11 o'clock and then used to go on for hours and hours and hours. Our best ever one finished after closing time in the evening. So we're talking about tutorials that would go on for 12 hours, at maximum. They were just fantastic.
MCG: And that was one-to-one attention almost?
PH: Well yes, one-to-three, for twelve hours at a time. That was tremendously exciting.
* * *
PH: I've got to tell you one other thing, though, about undergraduate life. In our third year, we got taught by David Clarke. It didn't go on as long as Andrew Sherratt, but he was, again, absolutely brilliant -- a really stimulating teacher -- and his lectures ... were very different from all the other lectures in Cambridge at the time because he was a really stimulating lecturer. Some of his lectures, if we didn't get there on time, it was standing room only, which was totally different from any other teaching going on at the time. He was just a college fellow, which is quite interesting. This is '72 to '73. Analytical Archaeology had come out in 1968, and Models in Archaeology, a big edited volume, came out in 1972. So he was a very established figure, internationally, by that stage, but in Cambridge he was just a college fellow. He seemed to have a lot of trouble breaking into any recognition from the Cambridge department.
MFL: What does being a 'fellow' at Cambridge mean? PH: What it means is that his funding was paid by his college, Peterhouse, and I think he had tutorial duties there -- administrative tutorials -- and he taught in the archaeology department, but really on much the same basis as Andrew Sherratt, a PhD student, taught. His lectures were crowded; PhD students used to go to them, which is why you couldn't get in, if you were an undergraduate and you were late. There was no question of it with any other members of the staff at the time.
MFL: I'm embarrassed to admit that I don't understand the university system completely here; if I ask questions like that, it's because the system in the United States is quite different.
PH: It's not university systems in Britain; it's the system in Cambridge and probably in Oxford, for all I know. But the way it works out, they get extra money from the government to fund small group tutorial teaching which does not come to universities like Sheffield. On the basis of that, lots of small-group tutorial teaching goes on, which is usually carried out by a combination of people. You've got college research fellowships -- because colleges have got lots of money for lots of research fellows -- PhD students and their spouses, which usually means wives (but not always) of people who've got university posts. The backbone of the teaching in Cambridge is these people who don't feature on the staff lists. You could be a student there and actually have remarkably little contact with any of the people who nominally teach you.
MCG: You would actually have the benefit of the cutting edge of educational research.
PH: Absolutely. If you've been taught by the younger research fellows and PhD students, who are really, really keen.
MFL: I didn't mean to digress, because you wanted to tell us something about your undergraduate career.
PH: Anyway, yes. Just to explain that this curious thing -- this really stimulating and charismatic teacher who was not accepted by the department, or accepted rather reluctantly. He didn't actually get a job within the department until ... it may have been until just about when he died, which was in 1976. He was in for posts there which he didn't get, which to the outside observer may look like sour grapes rather than meritocracy.
MCG: How old was he?
PH: I think he was about 37. He was very young. He died basically from a tragic accident. He was going on a lecture tour in South Africa and had various injections before going, and at the same time, he got a twisted gut. I don't know how that happens. It went gangrenous, and because he was having these shots at the same time, the symptoms were misdiagnosed as reaction to the injections, so by the time they realised what was going on, his intestine had actually gone gangrenous. So, he's rushed into hospital, nearly dying; they saved him, and then, because he spent a long time in bed, he got a thrombosis, which killed him. A stupid waste. As a way of giving you an idea of what it meant when he died, I was a PhD student back in Greece at the time and Andrew Sherratt rang me with the news. I think to lots of us who'd been taught by him, it really left a big hole in our life. It wasn't just like the death of any old teacher; it was felt very deeply. When the news of his death came through and Andrew rang me, Renfrew's team that was digging at Phylakopi were actually staying in Athens on their way out to Phylakopi, and there were several of David's ex-students amongst that lot. Several people just burst into tears, when I passed on the news. That doesn't happen with any old academic supervisor.
MFL: So many people felt at a loss.
PH: Very deeply, yes. Because, I think, for those of us who were taught by him -- well, as well as being a very stimulating teacher -- he was just an incredibly nice man. You know, he treated undergraduate students, who were really no business wasting their time with someone of his intellect.... He just treated you like an equal. A very brilliant person.
MCG: Presumably, had he lived, the face of British archaeology might have been very different. Where was that inspiration from? His influence has been obviously passed on. PH: The face of British archaeology, I'm sure, would have been different. Higgs, I think, felt very threatened by David Clarke, as did many of the other established staff. He did everything he could to stop those who were his 'directees' of study going to be taught by David Clarke. But David Clarke fraternised a lot academically with a lot of Higgs's star protégés. If you look at the introduction to Analytical Archaeology he actually singles out for mention, I think, Mike Jarman, Paul Wilkinson -- who were basically two of Higgs's closest henchmen. Beneath the level of the very top players in the establishment, there was a lot of networking going on. David Clarke was very interested in the work going on in the 'bone room'. He was very influenced by ecological archaeology in a very broad sense. If you think of the man who could do research on Bell Beaker typology or writeAnalytical Archaeology, and then look at his later work, he's obviously someone who's obviously broadened out his life's interests. I think he was very influenced by what was going on there. I think if he'd lived, two things would have happened: one is, Ian Hodder ended up in Cambridge basically filling a post vacated by the death of David Clarke -- so you can imagine how things would have been different; secondly, I think that David Clarke would have been more inclusive innovator of archaeological theory than Ian was in his place. I said that things would have been different; they arguably would have been better, but who can tell?
MCG: He sounds as if he would have been an individual who would have been capable of crossing other boundaries as well, rather than sussing out other people's needs and moving between them. I didn't realise this about him as an individual -- that he could be open-minded.
PH: Yes. Certainly for us, he was a breath of fresh air. He didn't bad- mouth what was going on in other areas of the department. His approach to teaching archaeological theory was to give us a 'thumbnail' character sketch of Flannery, Binford, Renfrew, and Higgs, and to try to explain how their personal histories explain some of their archaeological writing.
MFL: Very perceptive, very astute.
PH: It was a way of trying to give you some insight into archaeological theory. He always encouraged you to look widely. If you look at something like Models in Archaeology, the whole flavour of the book is about archaeology as being exponentially expanding....
MFL: Perceptive also to the extent to the extent that he seemed to be making the personal political and theoretical: it sounds like what so many of the post-processualist are saying.
PH: Yes. In that sense, he was ahead of his time.
MCG: That is possibly why he found it difficult to break into such an establishment, like Cambridge. He didn't play by the rules; he didn't fit into the campus so easily.
PH: Yes. You've got to think, this is a department in which when Grahame Clark retired, Glyn Daniel became professor, and you can't pretend that in the mid-1970s that Glyn Daniel and David Clarke were on an intellectual par. So at a point in time when Glyn Daniel becomes Professor of Archaeology, David Clarke can't even get a lectureship there, which tells you quite a lot about how defensive the department was at that time.
MFL: You said you started your postgraduate studies in 1973.
PH: You're desperate to get me on to that, aren't you?
[Laughter]
* * *
Peter, Paul & Glynis (et al.) (a Greek Peter, Paul & Mary)
MFL: Who were your friends there?
PH: When I started doing a PhD?
* * *
There was a bunch of us in my year and the year after doing broadly similar things, I think all influenced by Andrew Sherratt. We were all basically looking at settlement patterns, and, when we could get ahold of them, bones and seeds, and trying to make sense of some region of Europe. So one very close friend throughout all of this was Peter Rowley-Conwy. We were both in Magdalen. We shared a room as undergraduates, so we've been close friends ever since. Other people who I spent a lot of time with, when I started out: Jim Lewthwaite, who's gone out of archaeology now, Fred Hamond ... a guy name Coinneagh MacLean, who's also gone out of archaeology....
MFL: Are these people who are wiser than you?
PH: Yeah, evidently!
[Laughter]
... Andy Garrard -- who's still in archaeology, in UCL [University College, London]. We all shared a house -- most of us -- that's why I pick on those people. But very quickly we dispersed abroad after that, so that we've had to pick these friendships up years later. The interesting thing about that first year of research is you're required to spend your first year in Cambridge, even if it's completely pointless. You spend your first year gearing up to do things, and when you get abroad you find you can't do any of them. The interesting thing historically was that Higgs started in our third year as undergraduates a seminar series called 'The Bio-Archaeologists', which -- as people under his wing -- we were invited to. When I started my PhD under David Clarke, I was no longer allowed to go.
MCG: You joined the wrong camp.
* * *
PH: By 1973, the McBurney faction was somewhat on the wane; there weren't that many people wanting to do flint typology. It was Higgs ascendant, with David Clarke as a sort of nucleus attracting students.
MFL: Where did you hang out? We have O'Hagans, where we are now.
PH: I don't recall there being a very vibrant departmental life. There were pubs near where we lived. Our company was mostly archaeology post- grads, but we were also personal friends. There was not a 'departmental pub' that postgrads went to.
* * *
In 1973-74, I went to the British School in Athens, which is like crossing a time warp in a way, because you go from an institution where the discussion of archaeological method and theory is de rigueur to one where it's considered rank bad manners.
[Laughter]
So that was quite an interesting transition. It's also a good thing, because you're basically surrounded by people who weren't brought up with the same myths you were brought up with. When you start talking in jargon, they immediately are suspicious. People start questioning what you are saying. In Cambridge, because you tend to hang out with like- minded people, and you speak the same sort of dialect, you aren't actually forced to confront potential illogicalities in what you're saying. So you meet a bunch of people simply don't share any of this, who don't share any common ground -- what you've been brought up with -- and you're forced to defend it. In the course of doing that, you realise that quite a lot of it doesn't extend very far beyond being a dialect. I think that was a very good experience.
MFL: That's why I find it important to get away from the academy occasionally: one can start talking in circles.
PH: The other thing is that, through spending a lot of time with people who are much more likely to have a really deep understanding of some group of material culture than to be at the forefront of current theoretical and methodological debate, you also realise, in the course of research, that those skills are very necessary. On the one hand you might feel that what they are doing is a bit brain-dead at times, but on the other, you might also appreciate that they have skills without which one cannot conduct one's grand design. So I think that was a very salutary experience.
MFL: Shall we do this chronologically...? PH: That was when I first got interested in Greek music. My two closest friends, while I was out there in Athens, were two people doing PhDs: one studying Greek folk music and one studying Greek urban music - - rebetika. They started out having an academic interest, but through that, got interested in playing the music. We started a band then.
MCG: One of my first memories of Sheffield, after I applied to come here -- I was in sixth form -- was when my mum said, 'Oh, there's something on the radio! It's some Sheffield lecturers playing Greek folk music.' It was you and Glynis [PH's wife and lecturer in archaeology at Sheffield]!
MFL: Is it true you were on Radio 4?
PH: It's true, yes!
MCG: I heard that when I was still at school. It was my first contact with anyone from Sheffield.
PH: Did you really!? That's funny!
MFL: Tell us a bit about the band.
PH: We basically went around the tavernas in Athens, the four of us. We used to sit in the corner and play music. It was brilliant! We had a fantastic time. By 1977, when two of us came back [for fellowships], we had started getting offers of regular slots in places where they play traditional music. It was very tempting; it was not a clear-cut decision to come back and take up a fellowship!
MFL: Did this detract from your research?
PH: Yes, very much so.
MCG: Presumably, in learning those Greek folk songs, you were having contact with the language in a way that was unique -- a cultural language.
MFL: Glynis told me that you keep notebooks of Greek folk songs, and that one of the reasons you keep them is to learn dialect. Is that true? PH: It's not true that I keep them to learn dialect. I used to keep them; I must still have them. There are loads of records of all these things. At the time, quite a lot of what we were singing we either heard live by old musicians or we got off of old tapes which weren't in the public domain. We used to sit around with recordings we'd made ourselves, or with recordings made by one or two aficionados, and we used to work the lyrics out. Or we used to get them off the people who made them.
MCG: Did you perceive that as almost an oral history?
PH: No, no, no.
MFL: You never told anyone you were an ethnomusicologist then?
PH: But I wasn't!
MCG: You did it for the hell of it.
PH: No, we did it because it was fun! Well, that's not quite true. The two guys who were doing PhDs had pretty serious academic reasons for doing it. My reason for wanting to know the lyrics was because I was the singer in the band, so I had to know them. Anyway, that was terrific! What was great about it was that we all, as it happened, lived in suburbs that had quite big populations of refugees from Turkey, from the 1922-23 population exchange. There were quite a lot of tiny little places with a few barrels on the wall and a few old men.
MFL: Which suburbs are we talking about?
PH: I lived in Kaiseriani. The others moved around.
MFL: Kaiseriani was 'hotbed' of communism at the time.
PH: Broadly speaking, the refugee suburbs were communist suburbs. The oldest men in the community were from Turkey. If you went into the little koutoukia [small taverns, often in a basement] where the old men drank, you could hear them tuning in to Ankara radio on some crappy old radio set. MFL: Was there quite a vibrant political scene there as well, generally speaking?
PH: Well, that's a slightly different story. I went out there to start my research in October of 1974. The junta had fallen in July of 1974, and some time in the autumn of 1974 there was the referendum on whether Greece was going to have a king, and it was decided not. So 1974 was a fantastically exciting time to be in Greece. There were huge vast demonstrations, since after seven years in which people couldn't say anything at all, suddenly they were free to say what they wanted. Everybody sang in tavernas at night; everybody wanted to sing Theodorakis' songs, because they'd been banned. That was tremendously exciting, because one little group at one table would start up and everyone would join in, and the whole taverna would be singing these songs. So that's really what got us involved in the music. We were drawn into that because it was such an exciting place to be politically, but from that we drifted into the stuff that my two friends were researching. There were demonstrations that would take hours to pass, getting smoke-bombed and tear-gassed by a riot police that were not really under civilian control at that stage. When there were rallies of the United Left in Sindagma Square, you would have everybody who was anybody in serious Greek popular culture performing. In 1974, any serious contemporary musician was a communist.
MFL: Is it true that you played at a TAG [Theoretical Archaeological Group] conference?
PH: Yeah. When I came back in '77, our band broke up. Two of us came back. The first public TAG must have been the one in Sheffield in 1979; the second public TAG was in Southampton. (TAG started out as a Sheffield-Southampton thing, to which outsiders weren't invited.) Renfrew had the bright idea that our band should go and perform. The problem was that our band didn't exist anymore, and the other two members could not be persuaded to come out of retirement. Luckily, because Roddy Beaton, our lyra-violin player was teaching in Cambridge once a week that year, and because Pete Rowley-Conwy played bouzouki ... he hit on the bright idea of trying to teach Pete to play Greek tunes, and Glynis to play the drum. We had about two months to create a repertoire with two new members of the band. We just about managed to do it, and we performed in Southampton. That is why the new band was formed. It was down to Colin Renfrew. He's a very good singer!
MFL: Colin Renfrew is a very good singer?
PH: Yes, and he's also a very good linguist, so he can sing in Greek very plausibly.... We actually had him up singing on the stage at that TAG, and there were lots of Greek students who were leading the dancing, so it was great fun.
* * *
The 'coggie' playgroup
PH: In 1977, I got a research fellowship at Cambridge, which was incredible good fortune really. The good fortune basically arose because Anthony Snodgrass was appointed as new Professor of Classical Archaeology and Kings [College] decided to create a Fellowship in Classical Archaeology, because he was coming. Somehow it ended up being me, which was sort of stretching a point a bit. It was very lucky for me, because when I arrived back in 1977, the archaeology department at Cambridge was fairly moribund. Higgs and David Clarke had both died, and nothing terribly exciting seemed to be happening there. Because I got this fellowship in classical archaeology, I was appointed at the same time as two people were appointed in ancient history at Kings. There were two junior research fellows in ancient history; Wim Jongman, who is still in the field in Groningen University and a guy called Philip Lomas, who's not anymore. I was exposed to two people doing economic ancient history under Moses Finley, which was immensely stimulating. Because of them, I gravitated towards Finley's ancient economy research seminars in the Classics faculty. Finley had this really mindboggling strong group of postgrads from all over the world, really amazingly sharp people.
* * *
They were immensely stimulating. The atmosphere Finley created was staggeringly stimulating. I think that for me was a very, very formative influence because you were being exposed to this huge debate going on about issues such as the nature of the ancient economy, the extent to which the ancient economy was somehow dramatically different from anything in the modern world, the old formalist-substantivist debate, and so on. That was a really lucky break for me because at a time when the archaeology department was pretty boring, I was getting huge stimulus from things going on there. And then Finley retired, and ancient history became much less interesting, and it took a while for Snodgrass to build up Classical Archaeology, although it became very, very distinctive. He produced, then, a really impressive group of postgrads who were people who really can do both ancient history and archaeology, which is maybe one of the most important things that has happened in the study of Mediterranean antiquity in a long time. I suppose in 1979 Ian Hodder started getting this group of PhD students coming in, which included Mike Parker Pearson, Henrietta Moore, Sheena Crawford. Chris Tilley was there all ready. Chris in many ways, probably unfairly, gets treated as part of that cohort. He started out under David Clarke, and he was actually ploughing these furrows all on his own, before Ian Hodder came and before large numbers of other people turned up to join the gang. At that point, the archaeology department became very interesting, because of a group of really very active PhD students. From my point of view, it became a lot more interesting the following year when Todd Whitelaw came, who would be someone I would have a lot more in common with than with Ian's students, and Todd, as you probably know, has a ferocious intellect.
MFL: Is it true that you coined the term 'cogi-playgroup', as Mike Parker Pearson said in his interview for assemblage?
PH: I don't remember that. We used to call them the 'Coggies'.
MFL: From 'cognitive'?
PH: Yes. When they first appeared on the public arena at the first public TAG, in Sheffield, they were calling themselves 'cognitive archaeologists', and we used to call them 'the coggies'. I'm not quite sure why. I might have a vague idea that it was partly a play on the fact that at that time Private Eye had this strip cartoon called 'The Cloggies', which was the story of 'everyday' clog-dancing folk from the north of England, and I think 'Cloggies'-'coggies' was the reason. So those of us who weren't part of the charmed circle used to take the mick out of the charmed circle. In many ways, the interesting thing about that time -- to give them their due, they were an immensely active and stimulating bunch, they were of tremendous value -- but for the first time for me, the archaeology department at Cambridge was an exciting place to be, which it never had been before, because Andrew Sherratt and David Clarke taught you out of the context of the department.
MCG: So it made a centre of the department itself rather than relying on individual lecturers?
PH: Yes. The amusing thing about it in a way, historically I've found, is that they were very reminiscent of Higgs's style of archaeology group because, as with Higgs,they had their seminars and they were a sort of loyalty test: you had to be a believer to attend, so they were entirely inturned and highly evangelical. For someone who had been there in the early '70s, there was a feeling of history repeating itself.
MCG: Did you feel that this time it was a divide that was based upon the theoretical and methodological approach, rather than a divide based upon individual and their particular pet subjects? Did you feel that you were being excluded just because you weren't working in that lecturer's area of the discipline?
PH: I think that the difference from the early '70s -- I would perceive a difference in that Geoff Bailey, who was the heir to the bone room, and Ian Hodder never seemed to have any personal animosity towards each other, and that appeared to be to me very different to what had gone on in the early '70s.
MFL: Do you think that they were just living in different worlds really?
PH: Who?
MFL: Hodder and Bailey. And that's why there was no animosity.
PH: Largely, in a sense there was very little formal debate. Lots of debate happened in the pub between various 'coggie' postgraduates and people like myself, Jim Lewthwaite, Pete Rowley-Conwy, and Todd Whitelaw, who weren't believers. A fair amount of argument went on. Lots. For a while John O'Shea was at Cambridge and he was a formidable opponent of what they wanted to do, because he, like Todd Whitelaw, they both have some razor-sharp brains that home in on intellectual weaknesses very quickly.
* * * he naked truth about Mike (and other aspects of friendship at Cambridge)
MFL: Was Mike [Parker Pearson] among your opponents?
PH: Yes, although I thought much more of Mike than any of the others. For a long time, Mike lived next door to me and Glynis at Kings, and he had this little postgrad room round the corner from where Glynis and I lived in the relative luxury of a fellowship flat. Mike was a very regular visitor. He'd just wander in. One of the most vivid memories of Mike being there -- you remember the most striking experiences -- on several occasions, Mike would be in the shower, thinking about Marxism and archaeology, and he'd suddenly have what he thought was a good idea and he'd just walk out of the shower, down the corridor five yards and walk into our room, wearing nothing, not even a towel, and start burbling. Glynis always used to make him stand behind an armchair.
[Laughter]
Mike would be there, in full flow, very excited, dripping wet and forced to stand behind an armchair. Todd Whitelaw always used to explain Mike's behaviour: he said that he had very liberated parents who brought him up with the illusion that he had a beautiful body.
[Laughter]
I argued a lot with Mike.
MFL: About his archaeology or about his body?! PH: About his archaeology. There was a lot of more or less good- natured banter. I argued a lot with Chris Tilley, actually, whom I, at a personal level, got on with extremely well. I really really liked Chris and I have great respect for him as an original thinker, although I probably disagree with virtually everything he's ever written, and he would certainly disagree with everything I've ever written. I think that's one of the other interesting things that I've noticed about students in Sheffield: they find it very hard to understand that there are personal friendships that transcend what seem like very big disciplinary divides. A very good example is both Glynis and I have been very good friends of Mike Shanks since he was a first-year undergraduate. We're still good personal friends with Mike, but I probably have even less sympathy with what Mike does than I do with Chris Tilley, and again vice versa, but there are personal ties which are actually completely unrelated to whether or not you think what people are doing is appropriate or not. I've noticed on several occasions when Mike or Chris have been up here to talk, they've stayed with me and Glynis and the organisers of the research seminars find it very hard to understand how that can be. They can't apprehend that there are social ties, kinship ties which go back beyond everything else.
MCG: Isn't that because, since the late '80s and early '90s, students have been brought up with that evangelism in mind, and they find it very difficult to understand how you can have those links and relationships?
PH: Maybe, although in a way it's not misleading because Chris Tilley in an academic forum is entirely confrontational.
* * *
He's a very cutting opponent.
MCG: He's merciless -- intellectually he can be merciless.
PH: Yes. On a personal level, he's a guy with a fantastic sense of humour. He and I probably both have vivid memories of shared experiences.
* * * MFL: What about the time you lent Mike Parker Pearson your key?
PH: The key thing? I didn't lend him the key. It was a big mistake. We were away for the summer. I went away before Glynis, and she asked Mike if he would water our flowers.
MFL: So it's all Glynis's fault you say!
PH: She gave him the key which I would never have done, and while we were away, Mike had a party, which was sufficiently big and boisterous. It caused a lot of noise and at some point the porters got involved. They wanted to know what Mike was doing there. Mike had said that I had said that it was okay for him to use the flat, which was a bit naughty of him, because I had no right to sub-let the flat, and also I hadn't given him permission to do that. Somehow he managed to disguise the fact that he had a key, so he did it again and got caught a second time. When I got back, I was basically in deep trouble for abusing college property and was under threat of having my flat taken away, and of course I knew nothing about this.
MCG: Was he apologetic?
PH: In such situations, Mike always tries to look contrite, but I don't think anyone is ever taken in. He has a long history of these sort of things, as you probably know.
* * *
MFL: I was going to ask -- if I could return to something less controversial, like the processualist/post-processualist divide....
[Laughter]
You talked about how perhaps many postgraduates today don't understand how many of these disciplinary divisions were bridged by senses of personal obligation and friendship...
PH: Yes, they were personal friendships.
MFL: ...and kinship relations. PH: They were personal friendships. That doesn't mean that the disciplinary divides were not there. They certainly were. Chris and I had, for example, precious little interest in or sympathy with what each other was doing, but I think it doesn't prevent you from relating at a personal level.
MCG: Do you think part of that intimacy came from the fact that you were able to banter with each other?
PH: We chatted in the pub. When you aren't talking to Chris about archaeology, Chris is an immensely funny person. You can't dislike someone just because you think what they're doing is wrong, or vice versa.
MFL: I want to ask a more academic question and that is whether you ever felt the need to reconcile your personal closeness and your academic differences?
PH: No.
MFL: No?
[Laughter]
You've never analysed it at some ideological level? You never asked yourself why it was that I can get along with someone so well who ostensibly sees the world in such different terms?
PH: To me it doesn't seem at all inappropriate. We disagreed intellectually but I never saw any reason why that should mean personal animosity. I don't see any connection at all there.
MCG: Do you think that's because of your practical life and the way that you've done lots of field work, the fact that you've had to be very adaptable and cope with very different ways of living and seeing the world helped you?
PH: No, I don't think so. I think the fact that the archaeology department conducted most of its debate in the pub has got a lot to do with it. We met each other socially. We argued interminably over far too much alcohol. It was just a social relationship. If I'd only ever met Chris across the floor in a conference, I'd probably find him a loathsome person, because he's very combative.
MCG: Circumstances were different.
* * *
The processualist/post-processualist controversy
PH: Yes, we knew each other. I can also say that several of the people who shared my cynicism of what the 'coggies' were doing could not see that. Some people thought it was very odd that one should fraternise with the enemy. Can I just say something about my perspective on the 'coggies', historically?
MFL: For the rest of the world, we're talking about the people who became known as 'post-processualists'.
PH: They did eventually, but I will explain that too, in a moment. The first public outing, as I explained, was when they went to the Sheffield TAG. They were being mainly baited on that occasion by Paul Mellars and Colin Renfrew and basically they were being 'got at' on the grounds that 'okay, how are you going to do any of this stuff?' When it first started out, they were constantly being challenged as to whether anything they wanted to do was archaeologically operational or not: 'how can you possibly do this?'. To my mind, I think that had very unfortunate consequences in a way, because firstly, their response to that was to start exploring other philosophies of science. You basically end up with the problem that people who wanted to ask different questions of the archaeological record were also operating on different sets of rules of inference, which basically makes it very hard to communicate. I think that was actually very unfortunate because it means that, whereas theoretical archaeology as David Clarke bequeathed it was a very broad church in which people who did archaeology and social archaeology, basically any sort of archaeology you want to do, was all part of his vision of a 'new' archaeology which was wide-ranging, but had some common sets of assumptions about how you proceed at a practical level, it became very split. Cognitive archaeology was developing in isolation from whatever else was going on in the Cambridge department, which I think was actually very bad, in the sense that there was very little dialogue going on. That was probably bad for both sides: those who didn't believe were being challenged less than they might have been, and the 'coggies' freed themselves from challenge by just setting up different rules. Basically, you were allowed to investigate the archaeological past on a completely different basis from the rest of us. I think that's unfortunate because if you look at what subsequently happens with, certainly say with Mike Parker Pearson it's very clear and later with Ian Hodder, they actually drift back into trying to address the issue of archaeological inference. I think a lot of time was wasted. One could have had a more fruitful debate.
MCG: Do you think that was because the department itself didn't have the mechanisms through which to engage with this directly? Although it was good for you personally that a lot of discussion and debate happened in the pub, it lacked in-depth seminars and organised debates in the classroom?
PH: The real problem was that there was no real alternative focus to what Ian's students were trying to do. There were a lot of people involved in the 'debate', but there was really no big alternative focus. I think that was unfortunate. If you look at archaeological theory today, there has plainly been some fusion. A lot of post-processualists have backed off from many extreme statements. A lot of people who would be classified as processualists are plainly not working the same way as they were in 1980, so the field moves on. I think there was a strategic decision made by Ian, partly for practical reasons, developing their ideas, and partly for cynical reasons of promoting that group, that they withdrew themselves from certain circles.
MFL: Perhaps that's always a necessary step in developing a new paradigm?
MCG: When Mike talks about the internal politics of the group and the way in which they were very competitive within that group itself, do you think that was maybe their problem, that they had enough competition to deal with inside the group? * * *
PH: I'll try and explain how, as I understood it, post-processualism happened, because before Ian and fellow travellers invented the term 'post-processualism', I don't think many of us, like myself, thought we were processualists. Obviously, there was a literature in the States from which that's derived, but I never heard anybody in Cambridge talk about themselves as practising 'processual archaeology' before post- processual archaeology happened. The first time I ever heard the term processual archaeology being bandied around really was when Mike Parker Pearson came from Southampton where, I think because of Renfrew, they were much more oriented towards American archaeology than we were in Cambridge. Mike was very strong on the historical background of processual archaeology in a way which I think we weren't. I think the term 'post-processual archaeology' was actually very significant because, when Renfrew got the chair in Cambridge, his inaugural lecture, if you read it, is an exercise in laying on hands or like incorporating the young Turks, like Hodder. If you look closely, what Renfrew does, amongst other things, is say that Ian Hodder's cognitive archaeology is basically pursuing the ideas that he pursued in his 1972 book Emergence [The Emergence of Civilisation] on the symbolic subsystem. To me it seemed this was an act of incorporation.
MFL: Co-optation?
PH: Co-optation. A similar thing goes on with Mike Rowlands in there if I remember -- it's ages since I read it -- but you can see this act of trying to portray the big players in theoretical archaeology at the time as being logical off-shoots of himself. Ian's response to that was twofold: one is that you immediately try to deny the significance of processual archaeology by renaming cognitive archaeology 'post-processual archaeology', so that the 'post-' is very important. Basically, instead of having New Archaeology, of which cognitive archaeology is a logical branch, you have processual archaeology which is passé, like 'Old' Archaeology, and you have post-processual archaeology. A very clever ruse. And to drive the nail into the coffin even more painfully, you develop this notion of revisionist archaeology in which you draw attention to the ways in which post-processualists are going back to the works of people like Stuart Piggott and Glyn Daniels, and so what Hodder did was start inviting people like Piggott and Daniels to come and give seminars in Cambridge to the chosen acolytes, which an absolute masterstroke, because Renfrew then doesn't have a clue because...
MCG: They are the old guard.
PH: They're also his patrons.
* * *
Renfrew's skill was to be the bête noire of the New Archaeology but to maintain social ties to these patrons in the old generation, which is of course very different from the Binford strategy of posing as a revolutionary and debunking Jimmy Griffin and those who went before. Renfrew's got this funny relationship with those who went before -- they're patrons as well as those he's replacing. When Hodder invites the pre-processualists to come and give talks on their version of archaeological history, it poses him a fantastic problem, because basically what do you do? Do you invite them to dinner at high table which is the obvious networking thing to do, or do you ignore the fact that they're being lined up with the enemy? It's a masterstroke really.
* * *
MCG: Before I came to university, Renfrew was someone who was speaking out on national television against student loans and against the idea that funding should be cut for students because he argued that the most vulnerable would be hit. It's not always so easy to reconcile or to divide off his political affiliations from what they actually do in practice.
PH: Although Colin Renfrew has close personal ties with several members of Thatcher's cabinet -- they were close friends, he obviously politically agrees with much of what they do -- I think as someone who would stand up and be counted, I think he might be a better bet than Ian Hodder to be honest.
* * * PH: If you conduct debate at the level of labels then you can engage in a lot of trite posturing.
MCG: Which is derived from an authority which is ultimately outside that realm, outside that engagement and that can be part of a defence mechanism of rejecting.
MFL: I've always wanted to give Ian Hodder some credit through much of this debate, not because I agree with him theoretically necessarily, but because he never seems to have stooped to the level that Lewis Binford did in ad hominem attacks. How do you feel about this? Is it because, as you've said, Ian Hodder is apolitical and just doesn't care what Lewis Binford has to say, or is it because Lewis Binford takes things too personally?
PH: I think Lewis Binford certainly takes things too personally, and I think in that sense Ian is much better able to cope with criticism.
* * *
MFL: An infamous episode that many people don't know in this detail....
PH: Ian set up a seminar in which I think, if I remember rightly, three of his postgraduate students -- it might have been four -- did a critique of Lewis Binford's work, with Lewis Binford in the audience. Mike Parker Pearson was certainly there. Danny Miller was one....
MFL: Henrietta [Moore]?
PH: I think Henrietta was one, but I think there was a fourth. I can't remember. For a variety of reasons as to what happened afterwards, I remember Mike and Danny Miller very clearly.
MFL: Did Lewis Binford know that his work was to be criticised?
PH: I guess he must have known that there was a debate going to go on.
* * * I don't know exactly what Binford knew. He knew there was a seminar, he must have known it was a seminar to discuss his work, and basically they stood up, and they critiqued his work, in a pretty no-holds-barred fashion. Mike did it with some sense of humour and embarrassment, I think. The others were pretty direct. It was fairly embarrassing because basically Binford fairly early on got very very agitated and was standing up saying 'This is horseshit!' and wanting to leave and Robin Torrence was badgering him to stay. To my mind, the whole thing was stupid in two ways: one was that I think the attacks were cheap in the sense that what they did was critique work he'd been doing in the mid- '60s or late '60s -- and I think this was a common ploy of post-processual archaeology, of the cognitive archaeology group, and doubtless of every other faction that wants to change paradigms -- but they never pick the most difficult opposition to deal with. They were basically picking his early work on funerary archaeology, and they were going back to the mid- to late '60s. So I thought that was pretty stupid and his response to my mind was equally stupid because instead of just standing up and saying 'Look guys ...'
MCG: ... it's changed.
PH: ... this is 20 years ago ...
MFL: And admitting that his own thought had developed.
PH: Which patently it had, because the whole focus on middle-range theory. My perspective on New Archaeology is that you basically have two phases of it: during the 1960s. Binford and others stand up and they basically said you can walk on water, given science, and by the mid- to late '70s they're actually turning round and saying that this is very problematic. The notion that you can infer anything you like as long as you've got good archaeological theory has gone out the window. If you look at Nunamiut Ethnoarchaeology or Binford's Bones or his stuff on middle-range theory, he's confronted the fact that it's very hard to get to dynamic features of the past from archaeological statics, and he's actually shifted ground massively.
MFL: It's interesting that you say that because, of course, Shanks and Tilley criticise middle-range theory for being obsessed with methodology, as if these processualists still thought that the perfect method would help them obtain the past.
PH: Yes. To my mind, the big problem with a lot of the critiques of Binford, both Shanks and Tilley and Hodder, is that they conflate his writings from 1965 through into the 1980s, as if it's all one thing, and you don't have to be a genius to see that the man shifted his ground greatly. Now, he didn't help his case because, basically, instead of just turning round and saying, 'Look children, I've changed. Attack that if you want, but I've moved on' he, I think foolishly, wanted to stand up and say that everything he's ever said is right, which is a preposterous thing for anybody to claim, and he played into their hands. Ultimately, it was a monumental non-meeting of minds, and I think both parties played a really big part in that.
MFL: So what happened as an immediate result of this seminar?
PH: The immediate result of it was twofold. One was Binford was very upset. Colin Renfrew asked if I would organise a party for him in the evening, so basically, he came back to where I lived in Kings with various sympathisers, plus Danny Miller.
* * *
Binford was actually very, very threatening to [Danny] and told him that he knew nothing about natural selection, and he'd find out about it when he tried to get a job ...
[Laughter]
... which Danny Miller was, I think, quite alarmed by, although history shows that he didn't have any reason to be alarmed.
* * *
The future of archaeology
PH: When Ian Hodder started up the Haddenham Project in the Fens in the early '80s it would be, I suppose, he asked me, Glynis and Pete Rowley-Conwy to go and see him. We had a meeting to go up, and he said he wanted to talk to us about strategy for environmental work. The one thing I thought was quite interesting is that if you look at Ian's career, there's always been a part of it that wants to establish trench credibility, quite unrelated to his theoretical pretensions. The interesting thing about Haddenham is that it's the first time he's actually ever tried to bring his theory to bear on practice. In the past, he's always shied away from that. We went along and we gave him advice on what we thought was the right thing to do, and he said 'What I'm really looking for is something really novel, that no one's ever done before', which I thought was fairly interesting in its own sense, in that it implies a technique-driven approach to doing field archaeology -- which is disturbing. But subsequently, he asked me to work on the bones from the site. My reply to him was 'Look, if you get someone like me to do at the bones, I will basically look at them from very much one perspective, which is the sort of things you know about -- I look at it in terms of land use and animal management -- but given your theoretical interests, you, presumably, want it to be looked at in different ways', and I suggested to him that a perfect scenario would be to get Chris Tilley involved as well. I talked to Chris about it, and Chris was very happy with the idea that I would identify the bones and the two of us would analyse them but from completely different perspectives, so that Ian would get his radical post-processual perspective and he'd get a boring old 'environmental determinist' perspective from me. Ian vetoed that, which I thought was telling.
MCG: That sounds ideal!
PH: He said he wasn't interested.
MCG: Did he explain why?
PH: No, he didn't. I think part of it, at least, was that there was a schizophrenia in his early work: his theoretical work very divorced from his field work. With the field work he was just desperate to establish his credentials as a field archaeologist, which is very conservative in the sense that promotion has been built on digging sites and producing site monographs. He was hedging his bets. MCG: He was still operating within an infrastructure of accreditation. It was very traditional.
MFL: It reminds me of Allison Wylie's criticism of much of post- processualism, in that she says that few have asked how data have become 'theory-laden'. In the sense, they seem to expect all the data already to have been analysed, so that they can pronounce judgement upon it. Do think there's an element of that in what he's doing? You would provide an analytical method that would give him that data he would interpret.
PH: Possibly. This is a very, very indirect answer to your question, but [there is one thing] that always struck me as interesting about European prehistory. Andrew Sherratt wrote his paper in 1981 claiming that there was a 'Secondary Products Revolution'. I reckon that that is one of the most important papers written in European prehistory; I also think it's essentially untrue, if one can use such conservative terms as true and untrue. The interesting thing is that he notion of a Secondary Products Revolution is related to shifts in settlement patterns and therefore related to shifts in residence and all sorts of knock-on effects for material culture. It's actually been picked up very widely: Steve Shennan uses it, Julian Thomas uses it. I read something even today....
MFL: It may be one of the most widely referenced articles in European archaeology.
PH: Yes, and basically lots of people who are operating out of a broadly post-processual framework of interpretation are very happy to assume that model is true. Now, to know whether there ever was a Secondary Products Revolution or not, you need to have good biological methods, to know whether dairying and wool harvesting were going on. So it seems to be very ironic that one of the things that one is castigated in the post-processualist literature for pursuing -- because it's far too boring and determinist and all the rest of it -- actually underpins much of the literature -- the assumption that we know that to be the case.
MCG: Do you think that almost practical naiveté -- an unwillingness to engage at that level -- that has characterised post-processual archaeology for too long? Do you think it's now changing? Do you see work that's changing that?
PH: I think inevitably there's a fusion. Just take our department. In some ways I think it's a very good example, because, I think, the great achievement of Sheffield, as compared to Cambridge, we have people who occupy pretty much the whole range of between hard-line post- processual attitudes to hard-line processual, or even pre-processual, attitudes, and they all manage to talk to each other. I think one of the reasons that happens is that people are actually much happier to borrow theory and method as appropriate, rather than being too laboured by labels.
MFL: I feel that I should mention that this whole discourse has probably now changed that we're operating under the gaze of John Barrett.
[Laughter]
PH: I think that's quite appropriate, since I'd like to say something about John Barrett.
[Laughter]
After I came to Sheffield and long before he came here, John Barrett came to a seminar, a lunchtime seminar. I can't actually remember what the seminar was, but basically he was talking very generally about archaeological theory and method, and he was castigating Binford, as I guess he's obliged to do, and I was very struck by the fact that the rules that John was trying to set up for how one practises archaeology were very Binfordian. I tackled him with this afterward, and it didn't go down very well. But now he's here, and it seems to me very appropriate. I have many colleagues -- John [Barrett], John Moreland, Mike Parker Pearson, Mark Edmonds -- who, I guess, would identify themselves in terms of 'theory' with post-processualism... but we do still manage to talk about issues like how does one know something about what happened in the past, from the archaeological record. We manage to do it without passing each other like trains in the night. I think that's very important. MFL: A moment ago you characterised yourself as an 'environmental determinist'. Do you think that is true, or are you just casting yourself as the opposition or as the sceptic in the department?
PH: No. I would like to think I'm not. If you read from a very early stage the whole post-processual critique of environmental-economic archaeology, it seems to me that criticism was essentially unfair, in that from the point when David Clarke and his students were influenced by ecological archaeology, the notion that nature determines culture had ceased to be a necessary precondition for identifying a bone!
* * *
I would say very categorically that I do not believe in environmental determinism; I don't think you have to look very far to see that people conduct different [economic] strategies.
MFL: So you were just being Hodder's gadfly, in that anecdote you just told us?
PH: Well, yes. The label 'environmental determinist' is certainly not one that I would willingly apply to myself, but I think there is a problem, or there certainly has been a problem in the past, in the post-processual critique in the assumption that anyone who looks at a bone or a seed is an environmental determinist. I would say that's far from true; I think it's a very cheap form of argument.
MCG: Do you think that as a result of the setting up of dichotomies within departments and, particularly, between different areas of disciplines which has not been helpful in the development of theoretical and practical methods?
PH: I think that's absolutely true. I can't speak for many departments: I know a bit about the Cambridge department and that these divides, which have always been strong, can be very unhealthy. I think Sheffield's very different, and I think a very good example of the difference, of both directions, comes from about five years ago, when Ian Hodder came to give a seminar in Sheffield, in the evening, and he was taken by the seminar organisers to the pub, where John Moreland was conducting a seminar with the environmental MSc students. Ian Hodder was shocked that John Moreland should be giving seminars to environmental MSc students. He told John,'Look, what are you doing giving a seminar to that group?', and I thought that told you lots about the difference between the two institutions, because to us it never seemed remotely odd that John had been deliberately brought into that course to bring in another view -- other than that offered by people like myself and Glynis who taught the course.
MFL: To promote debate.
PH: Exactly. I thought the fact that Ian found that so incredible spoke reams about Cambridge, and ultimately, it's why Sheffield is a much better place to be than Cambridge.
* * *
Paul's PhD research
MFL: I'd like to turn this conversation to your postgraduate research. You've made it seem as if it was a very linear progression going into Classics when you were interested in Homer and there's only so much Homer you can read, so you turned to Aegean prehistory.
PH: I didn't turn to Aegean prehistory, I actually turned to archaeology and basically got interested in north European prehistory because that's where the most interesting things were happening.
MFL: How did your research develop as a PhD student?
PH: Basically, I switched back to doing work in Greece, because I was planning to try and do a PhD in southern Germany, and then one day Andrew Sherratt just pointed out that one of the elements of this would be spending a long time in somewhere like Munich, learning German ...
[Laughter]
... and at that point it struck me, because I already knew Greek.
MFL: But there's beer! PH: There was beer, yes. I'm sure I would have done fine, but it suddenly struck me that I already knew Greek and it seemed logical to go to Greece. So it was very fortuitous that I ended up going back to Greece, and I went there really with an interest in long-term settlement and habitat changes in the Neolithic/Bronze Age and gradually returned to Homer. Basically, I'd gradually become increasingly interested in the palatial societies of the Late Bronze Age, because they're literate and have documents. And I was very lucky as a student in Athens to meet John Killen. I knew a bit about his work, but he basically provided a very painless transition into trying to consume that literature because he's always on the end of a phone. It's a very specialised literature, and without some help, if you haven't got any archaeological training, you can't very easily get into it. He's helped me enormously, and that's what gave me the opportunity. The reason, I guess, that I became more interested is that, through looking at bones and seeds on the one hand, and having texts from the same sort of society, is that it's just a fantastic opportunity to compare them. You very quickly realise, as David Clarke told us all when we were students, that the reason that archaeological data and texts don't tell you the same thing is that they're telling you about different parts of the same societies, so there's no contradiction, they're just different sources of information. Once I started looking at that, I became more and more interested in the fact that, by bouncing one off the other, you could actually start to get some insight into the dynamics of the society, of the sort you can't actually get from looking at the texts or the archaeology in isolation.
MCG: That's quite a contextual approach to material culture isn't it?
MFL: But it assumes that there is a distinction between text and artefact, rather than treating text as material culture. That's not the sort of theoretical ground that I wanted to stray into in this interview. Or have you got to the point now where you can?
PH: I think I can very honestly say that I strayed into it for purely empirical interests rather than for theoretical interests, and as I've done it, I've gradually become more interested in the issue of the contradiction between the two data sets and latterly, particularly with some work I've done recently with John Bennet, you can start to see how you can apply archaeological ideas to the study of texts. You can see that texts have different half-lives, and once you stop looking at how texts function, you can begin to appreciate that certain texts were long- lived, certain texts were short-lived.
MFL: The question I was getting at was how do you see your PhD research as having developed from the time that you started your PhD to the time that you finished it because many postgraduate students I'm sure are interested in this. Already with less than a year of PhD research I feel as if I've gone through a very great change in perspective. Is that something that you can recollect?
PH: I think I can. Basically, I think my final PhD comprised two basic elements: one was the idea all along is that settlement pattern changes in a region were broad, from an economic perspective, which is what just about all the people being taught by David Clarke or Andrew Sherratt were doing in the early 70s, and the other element of it was that I was quite influenced by two quite different sources from a theoretical point of view in the course of doing that. One was in Kings, while I was there as a Research Fellow, there was a socio-biology research project going on, and I got very interested in the use of ecology through talking to people in that project, particularly Dan Rubenstein and secondly, through John O'Shea I got very interested in the idea of risk and risk buffering, which in turn fed back into the evolutionary ecology very neatly. The basic subject matter and the empirical assumptions that I set out with became overlain by those two influences and I think that ultimately explains the PhD.
MFL: What field work did your PhD research entail, and how was it funded?
PH: I had a state studentship for a couple of years and a Greek government scholarship for another year. I actually did very little field work because there were changes in personnel in the local inspectorates near where I was working in between the year when I formulated the proposal and the year I went out there to do it, so what I planned to do I was not allowed to do. The work was largely library-based but with a fairly big leavening of travelling around the area and trying to understand it and trying to have some personal understanding of the area by looking at it.
* * *
MFL: How do think work opportunities for people who want to work in the field now compare the ones you had then?
PH: In Greece?
MFL: Yes.
PH: It's very hard to say. One of the difficult problems when people come along and say, 'What can I do a PhD subject on?' is that most of the obvious viable avenues that you'd set someone off on are probably ones you have travelled yourself, rather than mess the ground up. So that's difficult to say. The really big thing is that, compared with when I started, there are far fewer PhD grants going, and that's what makes it difficult for your generation.
MFL: What sort of pressures were you under as a PhD student to finish quickly, publish, and to get a job in academia?
PH: It was very different then. I mean, funding was much easier, and people were much more optimistic about finding funding beyond the three-year grant. I think I'm safe to say, there was little pressure. Equally, there was very little done to help you conduct your PhD. People got very little supervision, zero facilities, and, compared to now, the help you got was trivial, the facilities you got were pitiable, and the pressure you got was much less. So it was a very different experience.
* * *
MFL: I'm aware that in all that we've discussed about your experience at Cambridge and in interviewing you and Mike Parker Pearson that we are involved in myth-making, that we are portraying Cambridge at a particular time as a source of sweeping changes in archaeology -- this great processual/post-processual divide that so many new students are introduced to. To what extent were students at Cambridge at that time aware, or did they believe, that they were involved in such a revolutionary change?
PH: Going back to Higgs's group, it was certainly a big issue for them, because I remember him saying to Tony Legge or Robin Dennell, 'All the jobs are going our way'. He certainly saw a process of colonisation going on, and there was, in a way, a sense that Robin Dennell, Graeme Barker, Tony Legge, Clive Gamble -- you can see that the Sheffield and Southampton departments are quite substantially shaped by taking them. I'm sure in the same way, Hodder's group saw themselves as proselytising to the places they went to.
* * *
Working at Sheffield
MFL: How did you come to lecture at Sheffield?
PH: Ah! Basically, Graeme Barker was seconded for three years to be Director of the British School at Rome, and so Glynis and I came as a job-share.
* * *
MFL: How did you find Sheffield?
PH: Sheffield was wonderful! I loved it; we both loved it from the moment we first came. I really enjoyed my time in Cambridge; I really did enjoy all of it, I think. In Cambridge there's loads of bullshit. You have a minority of highly visible students -- 'Hooray Henrys' from public school -- who are right in your face and horribly offensive. And the college system, as it's called there, has huge amounts of contention, and there are large numbers of people who are the children of academics who basically have trained since the age of six to talk with equal plausibility on structuralism, literature, and lunar exploration. They can do it all, but I don't know to what extent many of them are for real beneath the façade.
* * * PH: The thing about Cambridge is it's very, very privileged, and Kings College is very interesting in that respect, because after Magdalen which is incredibly reactionary, Kings does seem very radical. But there was also something very unhealthy about the way in which you can live in such a privileged environment and delude yourselves that you're in the forefront of radicalism. So for example, someone like Anthony Giddens who's sort of one of the great guru's of the academic Left can be on the estates committee of Kings College managing their portfolio. I'm very, very glad to be away from that. I find sometimes it would be nice to have the money to do things more easily, but the environment in Sheffield, to my mind, is just vastly better. I have never regretted, since my first week, being here. In an ideal world I would never go back.
MCG: What do you find is particularly distinctive about Sheffield in terms of the commitment to teaching and some of the differences in which undergraduates are taught by staff, in the sense that it's maybe a much less intimate, but more involved atmosphere?
PH: I think that since we've been here, this department has had much more serious commitment to teaching than the Cambridge department ever had -- which I like. It's also a much more harmonious department, in the sense that in all the time that I've been here you inevitably get personal frictions, but it never fossilises factional fights in the way that's endemic in Cambridge. I think that Sheffield's very different in that respect, the people are much more successful at collaborating across paradigmatic divides, and to my mind, that's very important. Sheffield is also better equipped, despite having far less money. I think that we've made much better use of spending resources.
MFL: Mike [Parker Pearson] spoke of how glad he is to be away from the department at Cambridge, because he described it as, I think, 'dingy' and 'crowded'.
PH: Yes, it was.
MFL: You've already spoken about the differences between Cambridge and Sheffield in terms of the relationships between students and staff, can you expand on that a bit? How do you feel about those relationships here at Sheffield? PH: The really big issue is that in the time that I've been at Sheffield the place has grown enormously because of changes in national education policy. We've gone from a situation where every member of staff would as a matter of course be able to name every single undergraduate, to one where most of us can't actually name most of them. That plainly reduces the quality of the education experience for us, and I'm sure that it does for them too. In that respect we're ... well, I wouldn't apologise for it, as we're prisoners of wider forces, but it's obviously regrettable.
MFL: The reason I asked is that one of the things that brought me back here for my PhD work was that I thought that there was a very good rapport between staff members and students. I always got the impression that students were more likely to be treated as staff members in training in this department and not condescended to as students.
PH: Well, I'd like to think that it's true. I suspect it's less true with increasing numbers than it was, and I don't think that's desirable, but I think that it's inevitable because, basically, staff are more and more just 'running to stand still'. You don't treat students as individuals in the way that you should.
* * *
The interlocutors were Michael Lane (MFL), Paul Halstead (PH), Mel Giles (MCG), and John Barrett (JCB).
Last orders, last words
MFL: How important do you think postgraduate projects, like assemblage and the research seminars, are?
PH: I think basically that there are two conflicting issues there. One is I remember from my own experience as an undergraduate, and as a postgrad, that I think I ultimately learnt far more from my fellow students than I ever did from my teachers, so I think that the postgraduate seminars and assemblage are brilliant from that respect. Against that, given the pressures that are now on us to get through the complete PhD in three years, then obviously something like assemblage is a double-edged sword. It has its dangers as well as its opportunities. I am full of admiration for what assemblage has achieved.
MFL: When you were at Cambridge did students organise such affairs, or was it all 'informal conversations in the pub', as you described it?
PH: There were quite a lot of conferences organised by students, so for example the 1981 BAR edited by Sheridan and Bailey on economic archaeology was organised by Alison Sheridan, and was one of a string of conferences organised by PhD students, so they were very active in that sense. They were very important venues, shifting the field. One interesting issue for archaeology in that in the RAE ratings, edited volumes don't count for much, but I think that in archaeology you could argue that they have often been a more formative influence on the subject than peer-reviewed journal articles -- which is an interesting political issue for today.
MFL: How much has your work developed since you were a PhD student? Do you think that you laid the groundwork for all of the research you have done since, or have you gone through many changes?
PH: Not many changes, but it has developed. The biggest development has been that I got increasingly interested in ethnoarchaeology, basically talking to elderly farmers and shepherds in Greece, and that has been fantastically revelatory for me. I've got much more interested in trying to do serious research in Linear B archival evidence and combining it with archaeological evidence. In that sense my research has changed direction a lot.
MFL: How important do you think that ethnographic field work is for archaeology?
PH: Well very, for me it's been very, very important. I think that probably the best things that I've written have either been based on, or inspired by, doing ethnographic field work, and I also think that it's quite urgent, in the sense that even in a country like Greece, people whose experience is worth hearing about are dying off very fast. The Mediterranean is modernising very fast, and just as people whose experience of pre-mechanised farming are largely dead in Britain, they're rapidly going in the Mediterranean, so to me it's a very urgent, as well as crucial, sort of research.
MFL: That makes me think of two rather different questions. The first is simply, do you then disagree with the Binfordian position that archaeology should not be about drawing 'ethnographic vignettes of the past', as he puts it?
PH: I don't recall the passage that you're referring to, to me I would be very happy to locate what I've done in the Binfordian framework. To my mind he draws a clear distinction between doing middle-range research, which is where you are trying to sort out how you can infer aspects of past behaviour from archaeological remains, which is say largely what Glynis does, and doing heuristic work in which you interpret behaviour, which is what I mostly do.
MFL: The other question is this. You say that it's urgent work because Greece is modernising so quickly, as is all of the world. That makes me think of Cavalli-Sforza, whom Renfrew has got involved with recently. Cavalli-Sforza has been quoted as saying that the reason why the Human Genome Diversity Project should be promoted is because many of these indigenous peoples are going to go extinct anyway, so we might as well mine them for their genes. To what extent do you think that archaeologists have an obligation, not to record these people before they go extinct, but to take up their causes and promote cultural diversity?
PH: In terms of the things which I'm interested in looking at which is traditional land-use, I think that it would be terrific if one could preserve some of it for several reasons. We are increasingly interested in preserving so called 'traditional landscapes' of Europe and basically if we allow hill farmers and the like to go to the wall, we will lose a huge amount of ecological, as well as cultural, diversity. So for that reason I think that it's admirable that archaeologists should take up the cause of these people. I also think that this is a slightly separate issue. I think that it's an issue that you confront as an individual rather than as an archaeologist. I don't see that as an archaeological question.
MFL: What opportunities are there for ethnographic field work for archaeology students today, say, in the Eastern Mediterranean?
PH: I think there's plenty that could be done. In the parts of north Greece where I work, it's still just possible to talk to people who actually were alive and economically active under the Ottoman Empire, so you've got the opportunity to tap into radically different contexts of living from those that exist today. That's going very very fast, and that generation is dying off very rapidly. It's a fantastic gold mine to talk to someone who's lived and farmed under such a completely different regime.
* * *
MFL: Whose work do you admire these days?
JCB: John Barrett's.
PH: John Barrett's!
[Laughter]
MFL: Speaking for himself.
[Laughter]
MCG: Shameless, shameless!
JCB: Absolutely! I want a Chair!
PH: That's a question I'd rather not answer in a way, because I actually admire the work of a lot of people.
MFL: I understand that's a pointed question....
PH: To me a more helpful way of answering it would be that, working in the field I do, I'm very lucky to be working in a field where there're actually loads of people of my generation and the generation behind me whose work I really rate very highly. I think if you work on Greek prehistory, you probably have a sense which is much less clear than if you're working in many other parts of European prehistory of being part of a pretty big and vibrant community. There are loads of people whose work I read with great enthusiasm and draw much from.
* * *
MFL: Perhaps it would be fairer for me to as what Greek scholars have most impressed you because I think that these scholars may have been neglected quite often because of how much the archaeological theory of Greece has developed in the universities of the North of Europe which have dominated.
PH: I think that's a good question, actually, because I think there's a big danger of under-estimating the importance of the Greek contribution to Greek prehistory. I have very close colleagues in Thessaloniki University. The department of archaeology there, to my mind, is amongst the best in Europe. There are loads of people there who write absolutely fantastic work. Perhaps less obviously, there are also several people in the archaeological service from around the country who do brilliant field work in the face of really difficult circumstances. They have to work under an horrendous bureaucratic load to conduct basic excavations, and so much of the really good field work being done in Greece now is being done by Greek rescue projects rather than highly funded foreign projects, and it's a real accolade for them and a real shame on the foreign projects that are so well funded, that they produce work of such poor quality by comparison.
MFL: Where do you hope to go with your research?
PH: No idea actually. I go where it leads me -- I don't have a career plan.
MFL: You must have some inkling?
PH: No. Intellectual curiosity is what drives me. I keep making plans and I never fulfil them because I get overtaken by events. Somebody asks me to write something for a conference or a volume and it seems like a good idea and I do it.
MFL: Why do you continue to work in Greece?
PH: Two reasons: one is I know the language and it's been easy for me to operate there; two, I know the archaeological record so it's a big investment, and thirdly, a fantastic thing if you're interested in farming, as I am, is that I can talk to people there whose experiences are absolutely revelatory for a 'bone person' and it's brilliant to be able to do that. I could do that a bit in Spain, Italy, and France, but I don't speak the languages well enough to do it properly, and they're more developed.
* * *
MFL: What do you think of the landscape archaeology as it has been developed and is taught here at Sheffield? I would contrast that with many of the surveys that have been conducted in the Aegean, which seem to be concerned with the identification of sites and the ranking of sites; therefore they seem to be very atomistic, whereas the landscape archaeology seems to be more concerned with the relationship between things in a survey area.
PH: I'm sure there is potential for the application of similar ideas to Greece. I think there is also a practical reason why Greek settlement archaeology is different -- the Greek archaeological record is basically an archaeological record of settlements and the north-west European archaeological record, at least for early prehistory, is one of monuments, causewayed camps, barrows, what have you, so it's a completely different archaeological record that lends itself to a very different sort of emphasis and interpretation.
MFL: And you don't think that's just because people have been asking different questions in the Aegean?
PH: I'm sure it is partly. I believe it's also partly because the archaeological record is very different. The interesting things would be to explain why the archaeological record is so different in those two areas, which is something that, for example I've talked quite a lot about with John Barrett. It's a 'reflexive' question, as people say: it's how to approach and handle data.
* * *
[THE END]