The interlocutors were Michael Lane (MFL), Paul Halstead (PH), Mel Giles (MCG), and John Barrett (JCB).
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.
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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.
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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.
Copyright © assemblage 1998