• 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

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.