INTERVIEW an Interview with Professor Ruth Whitehouse
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INTERVIEW21 An Interview with Professor Ruth Whitehouse, Institute of Archaeology, UCL Interview prepared by Fiona Handley, Steve Townend, Julie Eklund and Cornelia Kleinitz Ruth Whitehouse was recently made the first female professor at the Institute of Archae- ology, UCL. She was awarded her PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1968 and has had ongoing research interests in the prehistory of Italy, with particular foci on religion and ritual, and gender. She was a founder member of the Accordia Research Institute in 1988, which promotes Italian archaeology in the UK. She was the co-director of the survey and excavation of the Iron Age site of Gravina in Puglia in southern Italy, and of the Alto-Medio Polesine-Basso Veronese Project on the Po plain. Prof. Whitehouse has recently begun two new projects in Italy: ‘The Tavoliere/Gargano Prehistory Project’ and ‘Developmental Literacy and the Establishment of Regional and State Identity in Early Italy: Research Be- yond Etruria, Greece and Rome’. Could you give us an account of your career to date? How did you be- come interested in archaeology? I was interested in archaeology as a child; from about the age of 12 I can remember knowing that that’s what I wanted to do. I grew up in a middle class family that went to museums and things like that, and I had a great uncle of German-Jewish ori- gin who was a history professor and living in America at the time that I knew him. He always encouraged me; I remember him giving me as a birthday present at an early age, Wessex from the Air, which is a book of aerial photographs of Wessex. I suppose I must have shown signs of interest at a very early age and was just encour- aged really. I went through a phase of Egyptology and then, when I started digging in my mid- to later teens I got involved in Romano-British archaeology and a little bit of Iron Age. I didn’t dig locally actually. I’d been interested in archaeology for several years be- fore I started digging – I was 15 when I went on my first dig – and I decided that I needed to go on a training excavation. The main training digs at that time were run by Graham Webster at Wroxeter, so I went there for two years in succession when I was 15 and 16; the second one was where I met Colin Renfrew. I think he had done ‘Natural Sciences – Part I’ at Cambridge and then decided to change to archaeology so he was getting a rapid training in digging at that time. Over a number of years I also went on digs in that same area – the Welsh Marches – on Iron Age sites, run by Stan Stanford, Nicholas Thomas and others. I only became a fully-fledged prehistorian when I went to university. I went to Cam- bridge and everybody there does prehistory so that’s where I became a prehistorian. I did my first degree and my PhD at Cambridge, which got me into Italian archae- ology. My teachers were people like Grahame Clark, Glyn Daniel and Charles McBurney; they were the main archaeologists there at that time. I did enjoy my time at Cambridge a lot, although I guess that I would have enjoyed wherever I did my degree and that whole period of my life, but there was a lot of Cambridge life that I was very ambivalent about. I opted out of a lot of ‘Cambridge things’; I never went Papers from the Institute of Archaeology 13 (2002): 21-33 22 An Interview with Ruth Whitehouse to a May Ball for instance, and I wasn’t keen on College life. I was at New Hall, which was at that stage a brand new College, which didn’t have its own building. I really didn’t like the whole set-up; even though the main Colleges are now co- educational, they are really still men’s clubs. I still feel like that. I feel uncomfort- able in those kinds of surroundings so I concentrated mostly on the department and made lots of good friends and colleagues there, but I never really wanted to go back there for a job; not that I was offered one, I hasten to add. I then had a period of a few years when I wasn’t employed, was married and produc- ing and bringing up my children, and was working on my then husband’s excavation in Iran, spending time between there and Britain. It was really only when my mar- riage broke down in the mid 70s that I started looking for proper jobs in archaeology in Britain. I did a couple of years of extra-mural teaching and then I got a job in Lancaster, which I began in 1977. It was a very small department of Classics and Archaeology; there were only five archaeologists so we were doing lots of general teaching of archaeological method and theory. I taught most of prehistory, not the Palaeolithic, but pretty well everything else, with specialist courses on Italian prehis- tory. At Lancaster we had a concentration on Italy because – at least for a time – we had Tim Potter, who did Roman Italy and Hugo Blake, who did medieval archae- ology in Italy. That went on until they closed the department down in 1988. At that point, both Hugo Blake and I transferred to Queen Mary and Westfield College, as it then was, part of London University. There we were able to preserve an Italian ar- chaeology specialisation within what was set up as a department of ‘Mediterranean Studies’ which combined Classics and archaeology, but with a particular concentra- tion on Italy. It was during this period that Accordia was established. That lasted until they closed the department down in 1993, at which point I transferred to the Institute of Archaeology, UCL, which so far, they haven’t closed down! It has recently been announced that you have been made the first female professor in the long history of the Institute of Archaeology – what does that appointment mean to you and how does it relate to your career as you have described it? I’m slightly ambivalent about an answer to this. I’ve never felt that I was particu- larly ambitious but, at the same time, I always half thought I ought to get to the point of getting a Chair at some stage. At one level I feel “right, I’ve got that” and that’s very nice. I am particularly pleased because of the implications of the first woman Professorship here and hope that it is going to be the beginning of a change in the situation for women in the Institute generally. One of the things that I really like is the way that all the female research students were so enthusiastic about it; it was worth having persisted, if it really does encourage people. A quick scan of staff in archaeology departments in the UK reveals 10 women professors – you’ll be the 11th. Prior to your appointment, there were already 12 professors at the Institute of Archaeology – all of them men. How can the lack of women in prominent academic positions within archaeology be explained both at UCL and wider academia, espe- InterviewAn Interview with with Colin Ruth Renfrew Whitehouse 23 cially given the precedent of early female archaeologists at UCL and the Institute of Archaeology? Well, I’m not quite sure how it can be explained: I think this is an issue within ar- chaeology itself, and not just about UCL – it has been a very male dominated profes- sion, and I think probably more so than many other academic subjects outside the hard sciences and things like pure maths, which tend to be very male dominated. I guess the fieldwork side in particular has had that male dominance in the form of a military element that originated out of Pitt Rivers first, and then Wheeler. Certainly, when I first started digging in the late 50s, and right through the 60s, that kind of ethos was incredibly dominant on excavation. As to UCL, it was very good in terms of what it did for women in its early stages, but it’s just resting on its laurels now. I just checked the college website the other day, and it still claims that UCL has the largest number of female professors of any university in the country. This is true, but it’s only because it has by far the largest number of professors altogether, and I think that if you do it in a rank order of per- centages, last time I saw, it was something like 15th. So I think it’s disingenuous to claim that and also complacent. However, over the last year or so, under pressure from the Government on universities in general, they do seem to be investigating what is going on in equal opportunities, presumably with the aim of improving the situation. About one third of professional archaeologists and half of the under- graduate intake in archaeology departments are women, but this num- ber is in no way reflected in the numbers of women in senior positions within departments. Do you think this situation justifies the introduc- tion of positive discrimination, for example by prioritising projects with women directors through the British Academy Larger Research Grant scheme? The problem is the one that is often described as the glass ceiling, the lack of obvi- ous reasons why there aren’t promotions and large grants being awarded to women and so on.