The interlocutors were Michael Lane (MFL), Paul Halstead (PH), Mel Giles (MCG), and John Barrett (JCB).
Last orders, last words
MFL: How important do you think postgraduate projects, like assemblage and the research seminars, are?
PH: I think basically that there are two conflicting issues there. One is I remember from my own experience as an undergraduate, and as a postgrad, that I think I ultimately learnt far more from my fellow students than I ever did from my teachers, so I think that the postgraduate seminars and assemblage are brilliant from that respect. Against that, given the pressures that are now on us to get through the complete PhD in three years, then obviously something like assemblage is a double-edged sword. It has its dangers as well as its opportunities. I am full of admiration for what assemblage has achieved.
MFL: When you were at Cambridge did students organise such affairs, or was it all 'informal conversations in the pub', as you described it?
PH: There were quite a lot of conferences organised by students, so for example the 1981 BAR edited by Sheridan and Bailey on economic archaeology was organised by Alison Sheridan, and was one of a string of conferences organised by PhD students, so they were very active in that sense. They were very important venues, shifting the field. One interesting issue for archaeology in that in the RAE ratings, edited volumes don't count for much, but I think that in archaeology you could argue that they have often been a more formative influence on the subject than peer-reviewed journal articles -- which is an interesting political issue for today.
MFL: How much has your work developed since you were a PhD student? Do you think that you laid the groundwork for all of the research you have done since, or have you gone through many changes?
PH: Not many changes, but it has developed. The biggest development has been that I got increasingly interested in ethnoarchaeology, basically talking to elderly farmers and shepherds in Greece, and that has been fantastically revelatory for me. I've got much more interested in trying to do serious research in Linear B archival evidence and combining it with archaeological evidence. In that sense my research has changed direction a lot.
MFL: How important do you think that ethnographic field work is for archaeology?
PH: Well very, for me it's been very, very important. I think that probably the best things that I've written have either been based on, or inspired by, doing ethnographic field work, and I also think that it's quite urgent, in the sense that even in a country like Greece, people whose experience is worth hearing about are dying off very fast. The Mediterranean is modernising very fast, and just as people whose experience of pre-mechanised farming are largely dead in Britain, they're rapidly going in the Mediterranean, so to me it's a very urgent, as well as crucial, sort of research.
MFL: That makes me think of two rather different questions. The first is simply, do you then disagree with the Binfordian position that archaeology should not be about drawing 'ethnographic vignettes of the past', as he puts it?
PH: I don't recall the passage that you're referring to, to me I would be very happy to locate what I've done in the Binfordian framework. To my mind he draws a clear distinction between doing middle-range research, which is where you are trying to sort out how you can infer aspects of past behaviour from archaeological remains, which is say largely what Glynis does, and doing heuristic work in which you interpret behaviour, which is what I mostly do.
MFL: The other question is this. You say that it's urgent work because Greece is modernising so quickly, as is all of the world. That makes me think of Cavalli-Sforza, whom Renfrew has got involved with recently. Cavalli-Sforza has been quoted as saying that the reason why the Human Genome Diversity Project should be promoted is because many of these indigenous peoples are going to go extinct anyway, so we might as well mine them for their genes. To what extent do you think that archaeologists have an obligation, not to record these people before they go extinct, but to take up their causes and promote cultural diversity?
PH: In terms of the things which I'm interested in looking at which is traditional land-use, I think that it would be terrific if one could preserve some of it for several reasons. We are increasingly interested in preserving so called 'traditional landscapes' of Europe and basically if we allow hill farmers and the like to go to the wall, we will lose a huge amount of ecological, as well as cultural, diversity. So for that reason I think that it's admirable that archaeologists should take up the cause of these people. I also think that this is a slightly separate issue. I think that it's an issue that you confront as an individual rather than as an archaeologist. I don't see that as an archaeological question.
MFL: What opportunities are there for ethnographic field work for archaeology students today, say, in the Eastern Mediterranean?
PH: I think there's plenty that could be done. In the parts of north Greece where I work, it's still just possible to talk to people who actually were alive and economically active under the Ottoman Empire, so you've got the opportunity to tap into radically different contexts of living from those that exist today. That's going very very fast, and that generation is dying off very rapidly. It's a fantastic gold mine to talk to someone who's lived and farmed under such a completely different regime.
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MFL: Whose work do you admire these days?
JCB: John Barrett's.
PH: John Barrett's!
[Laughter]
MFL: Speaking for himself.
[Laughter]
MCG: Shameless, shameless!
JCB: Absolutely! I want a Chair!
PH: That's a question I'd rather not answer in a way, because I actually admire the work of a lot of people.
MFL: I understand that's a pointed question....
PH: To me a more helpful way of answering it would be that, working in the field I do, I'm very lucky to be working in a field where there're actually loads of people of my generation and the generation behind me whose work I really rate very highly. I think if you work on Greek prehistory, you probably have a sense which is much less clear than if you're working in many other parts of European prehistory of being part of a pretty big and vibrant community. There are loads of people whose work I read with great enthusiasm and draw much from.
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MFL: Perhaps it would be fairer for me to as what Greek scholars have most impressed you because I think that these scholars may have been neglected quite often because of how much the archaeological theory of Greece has developed in the universities of the North of Europe which have dominated.
PH: I think that's a good question, actually, because I think there's a big danger of under-estimating the importance of the Greek contribution to Greek prehistory. I have very close colleagues in Thessaloniki University. The department of archaeology there, to my mind, is amongst the best in Europe. There are loads of people there who write absolutely fantastic work. Perhaps less obviously, there are also several people in the archaeological service from around the country who do brilliant field work in the face of really difficult circumstances. They have to work under an horrendous bureaucratic load to conduct basic excavations, and so much of the really good field work being done in Greece now is being done by Greek rescue projects rather than highly funded foreign projects, and it's a real accolade for them and a real shame on the foreign projects that are so well funded, that they produce work of such poor quality by comparison.
MFL: Where do you hope to go with your research?
PH: No idea actually. I go where it leads me -- I don't have a career plan.
MFL: You must have some inkling?
PH: No. Intellectual curiosity is what drives me. I keep making plans and I never fulfil them because I get overtaken by events. Somebody asks me to write something for a conference or a volume and it seems like a good idea and I do it.
MFL: Why do you continue to work in Greece?
PH: Two reasons: one is I know the language and it's been easy for me to operate there; two, I know the archaeological record so it's a big investment, and thirdly, a fantastic thing if you're interested in farming, as I am, is that I can talk to people there whose experiences are absolutely revelatory for a 'bone person' and it's brilliant to be able to do that. I could do that a bit in Spain, Italy, and France, but I don't speak the languages well enough to do it properly, and they're more developed.
* * *
MFL: What do you think of the landscape archaeology as it has been developed and is taught here at Sheffield? I would contrast that with many of the surveys that have been conducted in the Aegean, which seem to be concerned with the identification of sites and the ranking of sites; therefore they seem to be very atomistic, whereas the landscape archaeology seems to be more concerned with the relationship between things in a survey area.
PH: I'm sure there is potential for the application of similar ideas to Greece. I think there is also a practical reason why Greek settlement archaeology is different -- the Greek archaeological record is basically an archaeological record of settlements and the north-west European archaeological record, at least for early prehistory, is one of monuments, causewayed camps, barrows, what have you, so it's a completely different archaeological record that lends itself to a very different sort of emphasis and interpretation.
MFL: And you don't think that's just because people have been asking different questions in the Aegean?
PH: I'm sure it is partly. I believe it's also partly because the archaeological record is very different. The interesting things would be to explain why the archaeological record is so different in those two areas, which is something that, for example I've talked quite a lot about with John Barrett. It's a 'reflexive' question, as people say: it's how to approach and handle data.
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[THE END]
Copyright © assemblage 1998