Colin Renfrew interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 23rd October 2008

0:09:07 Born in Stockton-upon-Tees in 1937; father was working in ICI Plastics near there; don't have any great recollection of that as we moved to Welwyn Garden City when I was three or four and that was where I grew up; father worked at ICI Plastics there; I never knew either grandfather; I have fond memories of my paternal grandmother who lived in Giffnock near Glasgow where I spent many holidays; happy memories of travelling on the trams in Glasgow; maternal grandmother lived in Ardrossan with an aunt and I have memories of happy holidays there; we sometimes went across to the island of Aran which has good megalithic monuments; I still have quite a number of relatives on my mother's side although she and all her contemporaries are now dead; I have tried to do a bit of genealogy and found the Renfrew family is from the Paisley area which is in Renfrewshire; it is not a very common surname; have pleasant memories of two great aunts who lived near Paisley but that is as far as I have been able to trace it; father was a very energetic person with a wide range of interests, gregarious, with a nice sense of humour; he was interested in languages which certainly interested me; whenever he travelled he would take a phrase book and try to learn a little of the language; my mother was also enthusiastic so they encouraged me to go to learn more French; I went to stay with a family in Paris both before and immediately after doing National Service; both parents were very encouraging of my developing interests; during the war years when there was no petrol, my father and I would go off on bicycles visiting parish churches; probably something of the atmosphere of churches stayed with me from that time; he also used to take me to the National Gallery and British Museum; remember looking at the mummies at the latter as a small boy; these visits helped to set up interests which developed later

6:55:07 At about five or six I started collecting coins, firstly from change where one could find Victorian coins; soon I was collecting a few Roman coins; my father took me to Baldwins, the leading coin dealer in London, and bought me one or two; I developed a serious interest in collecting; after we visited Etruria when I was twelve it seemed natural to start trying to collect Etruscan coins; I subscribed to coin bulletins and would ask for interesting items for birthday and Christmas presents; over the years I built up quite a good collection of Etruscan coins; later became interested in coins of the Civil War - Newark 6d or shillings became very special presents; I never was a serious numismatist in a scholarly way; I have a friend, Ian Stewart, now Lord Stewartby, who as a schoolboy was writing books on the Scottish coinage; I really couldn't afford to buy good coins in my twenties and more recently I have become more puristic about the matter as I realize how collecting antiquities does serious damage to the archaeological record; although I don't think collecting coins is as bad as collecting artefacts that have clearly been looted from the ground, I have now made such puristic statements that it would be inappropriate of me to buy more; I did buy a small ushabti figure when I was excavating in Canterbury aged about sixteen; we used to go around the antique shops and I saw this beautiful figure that I bought for about ten shillings; I don't collect coins any more; there are problems that numismatists have to stay within ethical guidelines, and although I have a lot of sympathy with some of the things they say, but having been so dogmatic on the ills of collecting that I don't continue

11:59:08 My mother was a housewife; I am an only child though I believe my mother had a daughter who died at birth before I was born; she was a delightful person and very interested, but not in the same energetic way as my father; we had very good friends in Welwyn Garden City, Ted and Renee Power, and he formed a wonderful collection of contemporary art; he had made his money in Murphy Radio which was a great enterprise of the time; he was way ahead of his time in collecting such art; he had works by Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko in his house in the late fifties and early sixties; his wife and my mother were great friends and would visit galleries together; the first school I went to was in Welwyn Garden City, Sherrardswood School, which was in easy walking distance; it was well run and tried to have slightly modern ideas about education, but its academic standard was not very high; although I was happy there my mother thought I should go somewhere a bit more demanding; they put me down for the common entrance for St Albans School and I got a scholarship; in those days they were not means tested; St Albans was much more academically orientated and had a terrific group of schoolmasters, many of whom I still remember with great fondness; also a very good group in my class, one or two I still keep up with; they sparked interests; the English master, McLennan, was very keen on poetry and he encouraged us; remember studying 'Twelfth Night' for 'O' level as well as Chaucer; also had a good Latin master, Coles, who arranged for me to go on my first excavation; Bob Tanner, the art master encouraged my reading of books on Renaissance art; it encouraged my interest in art and I began to enjoy visits to the National Gallery; the physics master, Geoffrey Pike, was also a great amateur actor and arranged productions out of school which I took part in; there were lots of extra-curricular activities; I never enjoyed sport; St Albans School occupies the Abbey gateway and twice a week there was a service in the cathedral; I was in the school choir and enjoyed that

18:15:07 I do enjoy music; I learnt the piano for a little but never got as far as enjoying it much; I enjoyed singing and sung in Jesus College with the choir; while I was still at Sherrardswood School, aged about ten, we sang Bach's 'St John's Passion'; I began to enjoy listening to music; Geoffrey Pike took school visits to all kinds of orchestral productions in London and elsewhere; I enjoy classical music but have never been a great exponent; I became more interested in the theatre than in going to a concert; I don't listen to music while working and it does not play a central role in my life; on politics, at school a lot of us were argumentative and there was a debating society which I enjoyed taking part in; it was probably a good training; I did not get more seriously involved in politics until I got up to university; Jack Goody was at St Albans but I didn't know him there; Stephen Hawking was also there, but younger than me; an exact contemporary is Joe Cann, a distinguished geologist, also Ansel Dunham, another geologist; I was baptised into the Church of England but never confirmed; I never felt the urge and nobody particularly encouraged me in the school; neither of my parents was inclined towards divinity; I remember being interested and asking questions as a child; I had an uncle, George, who was a Catholic and quite clear about being one; I used to ask him questions but was never very satisfied by the answers; I have always had a sceptical streak about anything, which developed while I was at school, so I have never found it possible to be a profound believer in the Trinity, or the Christian concept of God and Christ; it is a fascinating story and I find many beautiful things in the church service; I have not got provoked into the position of some to excoriate all religious thinking and activity, but not the central concept that this explains things; my approach has always been to try to understand how things work and I went up to university to do natural sciences; I have never really found that the concept of the divinity helped answer any of those questions; as Master of Jesus I did not find any difficulties; perhaps if I had taken a more rigorous analysis I would have found some inconsistencies; I think there is an inconsistency in pronouncing the 'Apostles Creed' when I can't say that I utter those words with a full and devout heart; however it is convention in a college like Jesus that the role of the Master is to be present, particularly at Sunday services, and perhaps to take the preacher into dinner afterwards; I know there are a lot of different devices; I recall that Harry Hinsley at St John's would not go to the service but would always take the preacher into dinner; one thing in both Jesus and St John's is that the choral music is very good; I would sometimes go in, quite apart from the obligation, to hear sung evensong; I have not done so recently as I no longer live in College but I can imagine going in from time to time to enjoy choral evensong; I was never hostile to the work of the chapel, partly because I very much respected the people involved, but I have never really done a census of whether the church is a good thing or bad thing in the history of the world

28:09:18 I read natural science; I had been good at sciences at St Albans, partly because I found general questions on the origin of the world, the universe, the nature of life very interesting; at that time in the fifties great advances in knowledge were being made; Penguin used to produce an annual science roundup where issues of scientific progress were addressed; I found some of the teaching in the humanities a little woolly and couldn't see the point in learning a little more about the history of the Tudors, for example, whereas  being introduced to, and understanding the laws of physics through experiment -  had a very good teacher, Mr Marshall, who was always prepared to answer questions; I liked the rigour of physics, and to a lesser extent the other sciences; the Headmaster, Mr Marsh, tried to encourage me to do the humanities; he was himself a classicist; it was a wonderful course in Cambridge as the Natural Science Tripos requires you to do quite a mix of subjects; I did mathematics and an additional half subject of mathematics, physics, chemistry and a half subject biochemistry, and a half subject history and philosophy of science; this was a two year course which I enjoyed very much but I was not a very good mathematician and it became clear that if one was going to see one's way through physics at a higher level one needed to be a first class mathematician; I was getting more interested in archaeology; I had been on excavations from the age of about fourteen or fifteen; Mr Coles knew a lady at the Verulamium Museum who knew Sheppard Frere who was excavating at Canterbury; he agreed that I could go and dig with him during the vacation; I did that for several seasons and found it fascinating to see the information emerging as you dig; I subscribed to 'Antiquity'; on a number of holidays I has seen some fascinating places, and gradually it began to dawn on me in my second year at Cambridge; I was not interested in researching on one particular organic compound; perhaps I saw some of the disadvantages of my father's life style; he was a successful director of ICI Plastics and as sales director was travelling round the world and enjoying it thoroughly, but only had a couple of hours to see anything; I didn't see myself wanting to become a captain of industry, so thought in the end that archaeology might be something to take more seriously; in Cambridge it is amazingly easy to change subjects; you take part 1 of the tripos and then you can, if you wish, change to another; I was lucky because I was in St John's College and in my first year I was on the same staircase as Glyn Daniel; he was a charming man as well as a distinguished archaeologist so I already knew him casually; when my tutor suggested I should discuss the idea of changing subject with Dr Daniel it was an easy thing to do; he saw no difficulty so I changed to archaeology; found it absorbing without the problem of wondering what to do afterwards; I did a two year part 2 although after one year I was actually qualified as a B.A. as I had taken natural sciences for part 1

36:05:04 At that time the professor was Grahame Clark, Glyn Daniel was one of the teachers, Charles McBurney was another though I didn't see much of him because I wasn't doing the Palaeolithic option, and John Coles was the Lecturer; also Eric Higgs was in the background doing supervisions; John Coles did the brunt of the work covering the Bronze Age and Glyn did most of the Neolithic; we learnt a lot about megaliths which he put across with great charm; Glyn was always up to date with news of the moment because he was the editor of 'Antiquity' at the time; all the students owed a great debt of gratitude to John Coles who was younger than Grahame or Glyn, and a little more in touch with what the students really needed to pass exams; he was at St Catharine’s; he took early retirement and went down to Somerset; he has had an active career since, also at Exeter; Glyn always made everything interesting and supervisions with him were always delightful; he was really interested in people so the personalities of archaeology fascinated him and became very entertaining for everybody; he would have drinks parties in his room on a Sunday morning where I first met Sir Mortimer Wheeler and other interesting people; I am also interested in the history of archaeology because of the growth of ideas; archaeology is a slightly curious subject because it isn't clear what you should be studying and it wasn't clear three centuries ago how you should find out about it; it is a subject that has had to construct its own theoretical framework just over the past two centuries; I think that Glyn's book 'The Idea of Prehistory' is one of the best books in archaeology that has ever been written; he did 'A Hundred Years of Archaeology' which is full of informative detail, but as an ideas book, the former is better; there are lots of things about prehistory that are not obvious and I am sure there are lots of developments yet to come; it is probably true of most subjects, but it is a subject that its practitioners have had to invent and it has been quite a difficult course doing so; Glyn really was thoughtful about the three age system, for instance, although it always disappointed and puzzled me a little that he wasn't thoughtful in quite the same way about our own time; he opined early on that the so-called new archaeology was just a lot of verbiage, and wasn't interested in the nature of new explanations which was curious because his book 'The Idea of Prehistory' is full of early examinations of what is the nature of explanation in archaeology; don't think that Glyn was central in the appointment of David Clarke although they overlapped; David Clarke was very much a protégée of Grahame Clark and Grahame and Glyn never got on very well; in their later years they didn't get on at all; Glyn used to tell the tale that he, Grahame Clark and Stuart Piggott had been approached to write a book together on world prehistory; they had had some discussion but suddenly Grahame Clark produced the book, which Glyn didn't think was entirely appropriate; they had very different styles but I have never really understood why they didn't get on; Graham Clark's work was very tightly focussed and he probably had no great admiration for Glyn as a scholar; Glyn with his very broad interests probably thought of Graham Clark as too narrowly focussed; people who knew the Danish scene used to compare them to Becker and Klindt-Jensen in Copenhagen, the latter being a bon viveur like Glyn, and Becker being much more strictly focussed; that was one of the realities of the department in those days; Charles McBurney was a man of great enthusiasm, devoted to the Palaeolithic period which Grahame Clark would see the point of but Glyn less so; Glyn did not get on very well with McBurney; Eric Higgs was a protégée of Graham Clark and followed his line on the importance of environmental data; Higgs became completely focussed on the subsistence base; so there were a lot of differing views in the department which led to people really not talking to each other very much, and not on very good terms; in more recent times when I came back to Cambridge as the Disney Professor, Ian Hodder was already there and we had lots of disagreements of a conceptual nature; he was a postprocessual archaeologist where I am a processual archaeologist and had never totally accepted their claims to replace all former thinking; in the early days they were taking a rather anti-scientific view; though they were no doubt justified in criticising the excessive scientism of the archaeology of the late sixties, the polarity was quite unnecessary and I found some of their claims a little pretentious and certainly not entirely acceptable; however, I made sure that precisely because I got on well with Ian and have remained good friends, that some of that polarity has diminished; our different view did not lead to fractious feelings where I have the sense that was dissention in the department in the late fifties and early sixties when I was an undergraduate

48:24:06 David Clarke was a very exciting person and in some ways he was one of the greatest archaeologists in the world; we were roughly the same age but because I had done National Service I had some supervisions with him and found him very stimulating; he did as a research student to some extent keep himself to himself; then he was developing his doctoral dissertation, his analysis of the Beakers, which he was doing with a sort of computer seriation; this was the very early days of computer application in archaeology; his great contribution was his book 'Analytical Archaeology' which was a breathtakingly good book; he had some good ideas about how archaeology should be systematized, how theory should be made explicit, then carried them through in a very systematic way; although his contemporary in the U.S., Lewis Binford, in some ways had deeper thinking about what he was doing and wrote some articles which were the most influential in the new archaeology, nobody ever produced a book of the same coherence and breadth of David Clarke; it is true that he used a rather special vocabulary and this put a lot of people off; Jacquetta Hawkes, who was one of the great humanists of her generation, wrote a very scathing review; Glyn took rather the same view; I think it a mistake to be put off by the vocabulary and if you took the trouble to become familiar with twenty or so terms, it doesn't take very long to become totally at home in the jargon; I think it was one of the great archaeological books of the century; for me, Gordon Childe was the most influential archaeologist of our time; when I turned to archaeology seriously for part 2, I read most of the books that Childe had written; he had a very clear sense of problem early on and set out to construct a way of reconstructing the past, piecing together the past as he would call it, by using the concept of culture; he was interested in prehistoric migrations and then he wrote about the Indo-European languages; one of his best books, 'What Happened in History' where he took the business of the origins of civilization in the Near East and its gradual spread to Europe; he developed the concept of the agricultural revolution and the urban revolution which are central to archaeological thinking; I think that he set many of the agendas; now you would say that he was a materialist but he definitely considered himself to be a Marxist; in those days in the fifties to claim that you were a Marxist meant that you were viewed unfavourably in some quarters; he had a complicated relationship with Marxism; he was the son of a clergyman in Australia and obviously was unhappy at home; he was stigmatized as a Marxist in Australia, and this has been quite well documented, and that was his most active Marxist time; there were secret service reports on him during the First World War and subsequently; he then came to Britain and became established as the Professor in Edinburgh; he then became a member of the Athenaeum and was said to enjoy drinking a tankard of champagne there while still being a Marxist; then he became very disenchanted when he went to Russia; he remained a Marxist but if you read the few articles in which he sets out his Marxist thought, most people today would find it difficult to find anything at all to disagree with; Childe did not lay much emphasis on the class struggle, so I would see him today as a materialist who called himself a Marxist

57:07:21 After leaving school I went to Paris for two or three months which I really enjoyed; I got to know the Louvre very well and was unconsciously laying the foundations for a lot of archaeology; I also went to some interesting lectures; I heard Oppenheimer there; I have always enjoyed going to serious lectures; I heard Dirac in Cambridge, who was very lucid but essentially arguing to his formulae on the blackboard and far above my head in what he was doing mathematically; I didn't get a great deal out of that but he had a quiet clarity which certainly came over; Oppenheimer's was a public lecture and much more easy to follow; I also went to some seminars in the Sorbonne on advanced physics and there was De Broglie who wore a white wing collar; after Paris I did National Service; I could have deferred it and had I done so I would never have done it as it ceased being obligatory; I don't regret doing it - the first three months which involved officer training, mainly on the Isle of Man at RAF Jurby and that had its interests; then I did some signals training at RAF Debden and did a little bit more physics there; then I was stationed at RAF Wunstorf and learnt some German and got to know Germany and Austria a little bit; I also did some teaching of 'O' level physics to airmen; one of the nicest things I have done is to have taught a class of about fifteen people all getting good grades; that was an interesting time with lots of good moments with some dreary ones, but no painful ones; managed to get to Munich and get slightly drunk in the Hofbräuhaus and on the same trip I went to Salzburg and managed a get a ticket for a performance of 'The Marriage of Figaro' with Fischer-Dieskau, and von Karajan conducting and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf singing; that is when I first went to the Kunsthistorische Museum in Vienna and saw the wonderful Breugel paintings; I came back refreshed and more mature

Second Part

0:09:07 Barry Cunliffe and I were in the same year; we have never been hugely close but have been on lots of committees together and edited books together; Charles Higham was in the same year, now professor in New Zealand; most of my friends I made in the Union Society where I got involved at an early stage and found it great fun; among my good friends was Tony Firth who sadly died some years ago, but many of them have gone on to do political things, like Leon Brittan, who was Home Secretary, Michael Howard, Norman Lamont, John Gummer, Norman Fowler, all later Conservative politicians; Ken Clarke was the first to get a seat; it was Leon who encouraged me to stand as a Conservative for Sheffield Brightside, a safe Labour seat; I was teaching at Sheffield by then and it would have required a huge swing to have changed my career; I wrote to the chairman of the constituency association and had a phone call the following day saying they were having the first speeches of those who had put their names forward and would I go down and speak; I did so and that went quite well; I was invited to speak again and I was chosen as candidate in the by-election; that was a great experience and put me more thoroughly into Conservative politics than I had been; I had been in the Cambridge University Conservative Association and that experience got me back into politics; no doubt that is why many years later in 1991 I was appointed as a working Peer on the Conservative side; when at Cambridge I became President of the Union; Union elections were very competitive and so one's paper speech for the term was always important; partly it is amusing because it is competitive, certainly quite light-hearted, but also speeches on really interesting subjects; I think that the Union was in many ways the most entertaining thing I did in Cambridge, and the friends I mentioned I am sure feel the same way; for those who became adept politicians it was an ideal training; we had a whole series of interesting speakers; in my term, one of the best debates was on the theme 'Science advances, religion recedes', which was proposed by Fred Hoyle and responded to by Joseph Needham; you would not necessarily think of Needham as a champion of religion, but I remember him charming us by saying he had never felt the sense of the numinous more profoundly than in Daoist temples in China; the highlight of my presidential debate was to have Lord Reith speaking; he was a legendary, monumental figure at that time, essentially the founder of the BBC; the Reith Lectures had been established for many years and a lot of people thought he was already dead; I invited him to speak and he was terrific; I also joined the History and Philosophy of Science Society and gave a talk there; also, the Fine Arts Society and certainly the Physics Society; joined no secret societies, except that David Frost and I with one or two friends, formed a dining club called the Cabal, which was by invitation only, and we had very elaborate dinners once a term in the Garden House Hotel

8:16:08 Frank Stubbings was my PhD supervisor; he was the lecturer in pre-Hellenic archaeology; I had been on excavations in Greece and enjoyed it and in my last year as an undergraduate I was looking round for a dissertation topic; in the National Museum in Athens I had seen a very impressive gallery of the Early Cycladic culture about which rather little was known; also lots of connections had been proposed between that and parts of Europe which seemed challenging; I wrote to people like John Evans who was Professor of European Pre-History in London and one or two others who thought it a good subject; it worked well partly because it was an under-researched field, and also because it involved travelling in the Cycladic Islands which are very beautiful in themselves; they were not much frequented by foreigners then and to travel in rural Greece is a pleasure; I got to know quite a lot of people and to learn some modern Greek, also the archaeology was very rich; I did site surveys and found quite a lot of things so it was easy to put together a new culture sequence and to try and do it more systematically than it had been done before; the stories about the links with the Balkans or Iberia, I had by then been to the Balkans in my last year as an undergraduate, and earlier I had been on holidays with my parents to Iberia, I knew quite a lot of the background; it was therefore quite easy for me to see that the proposed links with the Cyclades didn't add up to much; it was easy to write a broader conclusion questioning these supposed links; this work led in very well as a preparation for my later work; it was just at the time that radiocarbon dating was coming into operation; the radiocarbon dates in the Balkans, Iberia or in Britain, were coming out much earlier than they ought to have done if the traditional chronologies which Childe, mainly, had set up were right; the sort of links that he was using were links with the Cyclades and Troy, the Balkans and Iberia; I was coming to see that some of those links didn't really make very good sense and said so clearly in that dissertation in 1965; then when the calibration of radiocarbon dating came in and allowed re-evaluation, the dates were set much earlier which exacerbated the dislocation; I could see not only that the radiocarbon dates made sense but also the old links were not worth very much; I pointed that out, calling it the second radiocarbon revolution; my first proper book was that, after which it was possible to start establishing new links on a different basis using a different chronology; radiocarbon dating is crucially important because before it was available and then improved through calibration and other technical advances, it was very difficult to date prehistoric cultures; ultimately the earliest dates you have by historical means are around 3000 B.C. using the Egyptian historical chronology so you can't date anything older than that unless you have some broadly scientific method; radiocarbon dating is by far the most useful and takes you back 30-40,000 years; before that you have to rely on other radiometric methods which have become available; when radiocarbon dating came in it allowed, for the first time, the possibility of establishing chronologies of different things in different part of the world; for instance, in the Americas where the historical chronologies were not well understood, it was radiocarbon dating that made possible a book like Graham Clark's 'World Prehistory'; I think it was a turning point in archaeology because until then much of the energy of archaeologists had to go into establishing chronologies which were mainly solved by radiocarbon dating; that meant that archaeologists could now talk about something else as their primary interest; I am not a radiocarbon specialist but I did see, so far as Europe is concerned, how the old system did not work and how the radiocarbon dates made sense; to start with there was a lot of argument; there was a very distinguished scholar working in Germany, Vladimir Milojcic, who said the whole radiocarbon system did not work; that was because he was following the logic of the old chronology, some of which was wrong like some of the links; I was fortunate having studied some of these links in a traditional way, when subsequently the radiocarbon dates came in I could see how they were to be believed and that a new chronology was needed, and also a new approach to culture change; the old chronology implied culture diffusion and the transformation from barbarism to civilization no longer worked; there were still rather amazing questions; when you look at some of the stone monuments of North Western Europe it seemed to beggar belief in the late sixties or early seventies that those could be earlier  than the pyramids, yet they are, and that style of architecture got going long before anything comparable did in Egypt; not only is that surprising but it offers you the problem of why they were made and requires fresh ideas on innovation; the same applies to metallurgy which was assumed to have diffused to Europe from Sumer and Egypt, then it turned out that there was a quite intense copper metallurgy in the Balkans in the 5th and 4th millennia B.C. before you had much elsewhere, one had to rethink how metallurgy began; it opened up important questions on how innovations arrived and what made for progress in these areas; in my own work in the sixties, the dissertation was not published but John Coles invited me some years later to do a volume for a Methuen series; by that time it was not so much on the Cyclades but on the emergence of civilization in the Aegean; the main theme was that it was to be interpreted in Aegean terms not as something that was diffused from the Near East; a lot of these issues arose from the radiocarbon revolution which forced new explanations

20:46:08 I was one of the arch-enemies of the new diffusionists but managed to stay on rather civil terms; I subscribed to the 'New Diffusionist' and read it; that was hyper-diffusionism of the old kind, really following the ideas of Elliot Smith that everything started in Egypt or Sumer and diffused out to the rest of the world; my own scholarship in anti-diffusion was restricted to what happened in Europe where it was possible to show that the diffusionist explanation did not work there; in terms of culture change I have argued against any one preponderant centre but we have to look at it in local terms and local interactions; I developed the concept of peer polity interaction suggesting that if we look at it in a particular area, like the Aegean, and you have lots of local centres interacting and competing, out of that you can get quite a dynamic of culture change without having to look to some external origin beyond that; on the Indo-European issue and the "Renfrew Hypothesis" that is mentioned in the Wikipedia article - I think it was written by Jim Mallory who is an enthusiastic  Indo-Europeanist; the clue that gives it away is that when you get to the links, one of them is to him; I read Childe's 'Aryans' in the summer of 1960 just before I changed to archaeology, and I was not persuaded by it; one of his last books in 1949 was 'Prehistoric Migrations in Europe' which I found very much in the diffusionist mode so did not make much sense; when I came to study the prehistory of the Aegean, where the Greeks speak an  Indo-European language, it was generally understood that there must have been a coming of the Greeks, a big event to be variously dated by scholars, but I could never understand the archaeological evidence for any major transformation at that time; it was part of a wider story of the coming of the Indo-Europeans to Europe; linguists did find a similarity in languages so where did they start from; there was the pre-existing idea which Childe had promoted that they were migrating warriors from north of the Black Sea who came riding in, transforming Europe, at the beginning of the Bronze age; none of this worked out on more recent analysis; horse riding is quite recent in pre-history, about 1000-1200 B.C.; before that you get horses pulling chariots but their first arrival in Greece was around 1600 B.C.; by the time I was looking into the Aegean we had already had the decipherment of Minoan linear B by Ventris and Chadwick and that established that the language spoken by the Mycenaeans in the late Bronze age was Greek; the  horse theory did not seem to say much about the Greeks or the Indo-Europeans; I got very sceptical about this; I did an excavation on the Island of Melos at the site of Phylakopi where I had the good fortune to find a sanctuary; in writing that up it seemed to me logical to suggest that in the Aegean you have a series of local transformations in religious beliefs as we infer them from the material which you can take right back to the early farming period; you have a series of small changes, then a flourishing at the time of the shrine around 1200 B.C., then continuity from there to early Greece in 7-6 B.C.; I lectured about that in Oxford and Professor Christopher Hawkes, one of the great figures, pointed out that the Greeks were Indo-Europeans and that the idea of continuity from the Neolithic period could not be correct; that sufficiently irritated me to feel that it needed a systematic answer; I had already much earlier suggested that in relation to the place names of the Aegean which were supposed to be pre-Hellenic, the time that Indo-European speech came there might have been with the first farmers which is one time that you do see a major influx of influence from Anatolia in the Aegean; I decided to study this and critique or demolish the idea of Steppe nomads bringing Indo-European speech to Europe; I had to put something in its place and the only big transformation in Europe as a whole was the coming of farming; if this was so then the proximate source must have been Anatolia; this is the so-called "Renfrew Hypothesis" mentioned in Wikipedia; the idea really turned out to make good sense; I wrote the book 'Archaeology and Language' which was initially not very well received by most linguists mainly because they thought the time-scale too early; much more recently Gray and Atkinson published a very interesting article in 'Nature' using existing linguistic data and quantitative methods to come up with a date for the first split in the Indo-European language family; they compared it deliberately with the traditional view of Marija Gimbutas and Jim Mallory which was about 3000 B.C. and then the farming spread around 7000 B.C.; all of their data points fell on the 7000 B.C. time frame; I think linguists are beginning to take a little notice of that but there is so much scholarship surrounding that they are not very willing to move; I have kept in touch with the subject and organized some conferences on time depth in language change; I don't think there is any better hypothesis for the spread of Indo-European in Europe and there are very few archaeologists who support the Childe theory on horses

34:45:20 The farming revolution takes place, probably at one or two locations that are in contact in the Middle East; the most westerly region involved is south east and central Anatolia; the farming technology is inherently an expansive one for demographic reasons; a typical hunter-gatherer population in such and area is perhaps one person to ten square kilometres whereas a farming economy will easily support a population of ten persons per kilometre, a change of a factor of one hundred; that is the reason that I think that farming economies are often expansive and there is no doubt that farming did spread across Europe; Cavalli-Sforza and Ammerman formalized the demographic ideas and called it a wave of advance; though that may be a slight over-simplification their ideas are interesting and the emphasis on demography is sound; what that means is that whatever the language was was spread across Europe; that is the only reason that leads me to situate proto Indo-European in central Anatolia; there is one school of thought that it was the technology that was spread and the population increased where it had spread; the beauty of the Cavalli-Sforza and Ammerman model is that they showed that if you have an exponential or logistic growth rate then even if you have only quite small movements of individuals, if what is motivating and powering the demographic increase is the acquisition of farming then what you do get is a wave of advance that involves individuals moving not much more than ten or twenty kilometres but it is the genes of those who are initially speaking the language; archaeogenetics has come into play a great deal and it really is rather more complicated; there is some evidence to suggest that in the male line that seems to be the picture but in the female line it is not clear at all; in a slightly more sophisticated model, if you imagine a group budding off twenty kilometres north-west, that group speaking the proto-European language, then admit two or three of the locals who are not Indo-European speakers and also have their own genes, the way language works is so robust that it will be maintained as an entity even though you only have 90% of the farming genes in that group; if you go on doing this several times over, the language spreads with the farming, and by the time you have gone ten or fifteen steps the genes are going to be largely of where you are but the language will be maintained as a fairly robust entity; I think that is roughly what happened and that some of the archaeogenetics is rather supporting that

40:32:08 I was fortunate getting to know my wife, Jane, in Cambridge; it was a romance made in the Haddon Library; I first met her when we were both undergraduates and I was in my final year; I took her to the May Ball in St John's; I went off to do research in Greece and she came out on the excavations in the Cyclades and I proposed to her on the Island of Naxos; by the final year of my first excavations of Saliagos we had got married; we moved from Cambridge to Sheffield in 1965 and set up house there and began to have a family; Jane had her own research which she was conducting as a botanist; she, partly under the influence of Eric Higgs, had taken up what she called paleoethnobotany and she did a very elegant dissertation looking at carbonised grain samples in Greece and the Balkans which we were able to collect on our travels; I think she found it quite hard work as a married woman to complete the dissertation but she did; that continues with that interest and she is a Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College; she was a lecturer in Sheffield but when I was invited to take the Chair at Southampton, as so often happens with married couples, she didn't have a job there and when our family got bigger she didn't look for one; she has maintained her academic career through publications and work at Lucy Cavendish; she edited 'Antiquary on Horseback' as a schoolgirl; her father was a Clergyman and encouraged her to study the Machell papers which were among the records at Carlisle; she knew the area well and transcribed and edited the papers; Glyn Daniel made a point of quoting from the book in one of his classes while she was there

45:28:12 I did not manage to overturn the Labour majority in Sheffield though it was a big swing; it was reckoned to be a safe Labour seat of 19,000 majority and we reduced that to about 5,000; it was the Wilson years and there really did seem to be moments when we might win the seat; this led to a great deal of press interest so the by-election was really quite exciting, an experience I thoroughly enjoyed; it was a six week enterprise which is much less time than it takes to write an academic paper; as the campaign had gone well it was suggested that I put in for one or two seats but it was clear that if I won a safe seat then I would not have been able to continue with archaeology; I decided to stay at Sheffield University; memories of Robert Rhodes James; I would put myself at the same liberal end of the Party as him; I have known Michael Howard over the years  and debated lots of issues with him and I am well to the left of him; I have often seen eye to eye with Ken Clarke and regret that he never became leader; I was invited to be a working Peer in 1991 when I had already been Master of Jesus for some time; I was honoured to receive a letter from John Major but wondered what was expected of a working Peer; I asked the Chief Whip, Richard Ryder, and I was told that it was thought that I should be in Westminster two days a week; at that time I was Master and also Head of the Department of Archaeology and didn't see how I could do two days a week in Westminster; I wrote to the Prime Minister saying that I could not do what was required; then I had a phone call from Richard Ryder and from Ken Clarke saying that perhaps one day a week would be enough; thought I could do that as Parliamentary business is only arranged a week or ten days ahead; the most appropriate day was a Tuesday so since then I have done at least that much; if there is a three-line whip and you have to vote then one can drop everything, but that only happens about once a year; I have found it a very interesting experience; obviously there was a Conservative government when I started and just about the first legislation that I got involved in was the Higher Education Bill when quite a few rather silly things were being proposed that were widely felt to be restrictive of academic freedom; I got involved quite often speaking against the Government on those specific issues; since then I have  been involved in other higher education debates; three years ago Tessa Blackstone was then passing through another Higher Education Bill which I thought was pretty poor, and said so; I was rather disappointed that there were not more Labour academic Peers taking part in the debates; a good deal of my debating in the Lords has been in relation to the illicit antiquities trade; since Labour came to power there has not been the same pressure to take part in all the votes; if you are in government then you need all your Peers to vote so that governmental legislation gets through; in opposition one can choose more selectively so I have not spent as much time in the Lords as I did in the first six or seven years; I have been involved in the forty-two days detention debates; I did not speak in debate as the convention is that anybody who wants to, can speak, so a simple debate can go on for hours; I did vote as I thought the forty-two days was outrageous; it was a very good debate with a lot of senior people in the security services and the former Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, and Lord Falconer spoke against it; that was one of the good examples of how the Lords can be quite decisive because the vote had been carried in the Commons; if it had gone back to the Commons the Government might have got it through again but with great difficulty, so the Government abandoned it; so a case where the will of the Lords prevailed over the will of the Commons

57:58:10 Became Reader at Sheffield then invited to go as Professor to Southampton; became Disney Professor at Cambridge in 1981; Jack Goody was Professor of Social Anthropology at the time who defended his department very strongly which surprised me at first; the faculty system does mean that departments are competing against each other for resources so the two big departments, archaeology and social anthropology, with the smaller biological anthropology in third place, caused some battles; didn't seem to me very cooperative, although all the individuals were charming, the world of the faculty board was rather strange; got on very well with Ernest Geller and thought him a great man; he had a seminar which he organised with John Hall at LSE which I sometimes used to go to; I had known John Hall in Southampton and he was very bright; Ernest was always interesting but had a capacity to be acerbic which he didn't deploy often enough in my presence; I remember a lecture he gave here on psychoanalysis which I thought was a wonderful demolition of some aspects of Freudian psychoanalysis; he did lecture by invitation to archaeologist; I am sorry that I did not have more interaction with him in Cambridge; that is true of the whole archaeology department, but one of the missed opportunities of being in Cambridge, partly because we are all busy people, is that we don't attend others' seminars; probably one of the deficiencies in our system is that I have not learnt enough from Cambridge anthropology as I should have done; a wonderful piece of good fortune was the founding of the McDonald Institute; when I became Master of Jesus it became clear to me that the resources available to the Department of Archaeology were lamentable; we had hardly any laboratories and a miserable little 1948 extension which Eric Higgs had worked in; we had a lively school of Ph.D. students but nowhere for them to be; thought we needed to take the 1948 extension and build on it a suite of laboratories; there was a risk that I might become Vice-Chancellor as it was then a two year circulating office around the Colleges; mercifully, the system was changed so that the tenure was longer; then I had this contact from somebody who said they were representing a wealthy person who would like to visit the Department; we organized a visit with a nice lunch in Jesus and Dr McDonald came with his two advisors; he was in his eighties, a rather brusque Scotsman, who took a keen interest in what he saw; Paul Mellors and Nicholas Postgate and others met him at lunch which was followed by good discussions; about a fortnight later I got a letter from the same advisor saying they had enjoyed the visit and arranging another meeting; they told me that Dr McDonald would like to give the Department £100,000 a year for five years and would that be acceptable; then asked how we would spend a larger sum; I said that what we really needed was an institute which would mean a building which would allow us to do archaeology properly; when I took that to the Secretary General of the Faculty he was very encouraging; I think they had lost some benefaction a little while before by not paying enough attention; they did say that if we got a building it would have to be endowed as the University would not pay to maintain it; Dr McDonald was invited again near Christmas, and the College choir came in and sang to him, and he then broadly decided that he would like to set up a McDonald Institute; we got costings through Ken Edwards, the Secretary General, who got in an architect to do a draught design which his office paid for, so we had something to show to Dr McDonald and he liked it; it would cost about £5,000,000 to build and a similar amount to endow; this was before the University took such heavy overheads which it does now; it was agreed, and though such things as an initial refusal of planning permission, and the sad death of Dr McDonald before it was finished; the building actually cost £6,000,000 but all was covered in his will; the McDonald Institute has made a huge difference to the Department which now has a decent base; I suggested it should mainly be for graduate students as I felt we should not let the University off the hook in supplying some facilities itself; I was the Director until I retired as the job goes to the Disney Professor; I am a Senior Research Fellow; I think it a shame that in some universities people are tipped out when they reach retirement age but think it right that they should not remain as head of a department; I do have an office there, so have no complaints at all

1:09:49:14 I was Master of Jesus for eleven years which I enjoyed very much; a College is a wonderful institution, and Jesus is not too big, so Jane and I were able to get to know a lot of the students; we really enjoyed student life and became very involved with the rowing which I had never done as an undergraduate, with music etc.; it obviously kept me back a bit with archaeology although I have tried to catch up with that since; it had its difficulties; there are always some Fellows who don't always agree with the Master so not everything went perfectly smoothly; we had our quincentenary so I had to lead the appeal; we built a new library designed by Evans and Shalev; it was a very good decade for us; I have always been interested in contemporary art and when I was elected Master we moved from our house in Chaucer Road into the Master's Lodge; we found ourselves with a lot of wall space so I took out a small additional mortgage on our house to have some ready money, partly to move in but also to buy some contemporary paintings; I bought a very handsome painting by John Hoyland to go above the fireplace and got some by John Mclean; there were one or two Fellows who were interested in sculpture and we agreed to have a sculpture exhibition which we called 'Sculpture in the Close' and invited some distinguished sculptors to take part, and that was quite a success; it happened again two years later, and gradually the College has built up a whole group of friends of the College, very distinguished sculptors; when we got our new library going, the Senior Bursar, John Killen, suggested we should follow the 1% rule which is to assign 1% of the cost of the building to works of art; that allowed us to do an important commission; we had had Anthony Gormley in one of our exhibitions with a beautiful work in the Fellows garden so we asked him to do a sculpture for the top of the stairs, so we have a very handsome work, 'Learning to See', there; Eduardo Paulozzi became a great friend of the College and gave us a wonderful set of prints in the computer room and a couple of sculptures; Barry Flanagan had loaned us a life size bronze horse from our first exhibition; when the Queen came for the opening Barry Flanagan was there and had a bit of an altercation with Prince Philip who thought there was something wrong with the ears of the horse; I had said that day how wonderful it would be if we could borrow 'The Cricketer' which had been exhibited at the Royal Academy summer show that year; the following week I had a telephone call from Leslie Waddington, his dealer, saying that Barry had decided to give that work to the College; we had another fine gift from Alison Wilding; Richard Long for our quincentenary exhibition did one of his mud works, and rather to my astonishment the Fellows all agreed that they would like to keep this work if possible; over the years the College has established a nice link with some of the sculptors; we are having an exhibition next summer for the 800th anniversary of the University and we hope Anselm Kiefer may be one of the lenders, Anthony Caro another; the College has got a reputation in the art world now; at the moment we have three dinosaurs lent by the Chapman brothers; that is something that has developed a dynamic of its own; Rod Mengham who is the Curator of Works of Art is very interested and well connected; I hope it will continue and survive, and no bad thing to have some interest in the visual arts in Cambridge