Life at and before the Institute of Archaeology: a personal retrospect
David W. Harris · Archaeology International · 2005
Here, David recalls his devel oping interest in archaeology and his years at the Institute, which saw significant improvements in fa cilities (notably the Wo lfson Laboratories), the appointment of new staff and the encourage ment of new directions in teaching and research.W hen Ken Thomas kindly invited me to contribute to this issue of Archaeol ogy In ternational, my first thought was what a pleasure it would be just to write an article rather than edit the whole issue.Having retired from the job only last year, I well knew the magnitude of the task facing the new editor: one that is challenging and onerous but also intellectually rewarding.So I welcomed the opportunity to add my mite to the sequence of retrospective arti cles that have been a feature of AI since it was launched nine years ago.But, unlike the former students and staff who have recalled in previous issues the early years in St John's Lodge in Regent's Park, my association with the Institute is much more recent.So rather than write only about the 1980s and 1990s, I have (with Ken's encouragement) taken a longer retrospec tive view, recalling how I followed a path from geography into archaeology, which led eventually to my joining the staff of the Institute in January 1980.My earliest if rather tenuous link with the Institute goes back to 1947, when, as a schoolboy, I bought (for one shilling and sixpence) and read Pelican Book A108, Wh at happened in history, by an author whose name meant nothing to me: Cordon Childe.1 In those early pre-television years after the war, when archaeology was an obscure minority pursuit, the idea that Europe, Egypt and Mesopotamia shared a prehistory that stretched back millennia before the civilizations of Greece and Rome was novel and exciting.I was already a geographer in the making, and Child's revelatory little book added a new dimen sion of deep time to my fascination with distant places.Later, reading geography at Oxford in the early 1950s, I seized the opportunity to take a subsidiary course in world ethnography, taught partly by the pioneer anthropologist Beatrice Blackwood (who had preceded Margaret Mead into the field in N ew Guinea).On Fridays, she used to take us to the Pitt-Rivers Museum, where she would unlock dusty cabinets and show us their wondrous contents.I remember one occasion when she whirled an Australian Aboriginal bullroarer round her head so fast that, tiny as she was, we