The interlocutors were Michael Lane (MFL), Paul Halstead (PH), Mel Giles (MCG), and John Barrett (JCB).
In the trenches with Moshe Dayan
PH: I should tell you first about what it was like as an undergraduate, because that's vaguely interesting. Because I was at Magdalen and wanted to switch to archaeology, I got sent off to meet the director of studies for archaeology at Magdalen, which was Higgs. So I was dispatched to see him before I ever went up. I had to go to his house. He lived in this house on Panton Street right below the university, and he had an office in the basement. I got shown down there. It was very dark and dingy -- very atmospheric, in a way -- and there was this bent old man down in this dingy basement. He said he might just be able to 'squeeze' me onto one of his field projects; that was the way he put it. I was very grateful, because I got the very clear understanding that I was very lucky to get into one of his projects. So the year before I went up, I went to dig in Israel with Tony Legge.
MFL: Which dig was that?
PH: I first went to Tel Gezer, which was being dug by a big American project. I was only there a few days, but it was quite an interesting site, because there was a huge American excavation going on and a little Cambridge team under Legge who were digging what Flannery later called a 'telephone booth' through the site. They were sieving it to get seeds and bones out. There was a very clear commando mentality. Whereas the Americans dug something sensible, like 8.00 to 1.00, the Cambridge team would work 6.00 to 6.00, or something stupid. Whereas they had Palestinian workmen who picked everything while they watched, we dug everything with handpicks and trowels. It was much more intensive excavation; we worked twice as long hours, and everyone felt very superior. It was quite interesting the way that Flannery very successfully caricatured that sort of stupid idea of a 'telephone booth' through a site which somehow is going to give you a subsistence picture.
MFL: I didn't mean to distract you from your story about Higgs.
PH: Well, a few minutes before I got to this site, it had a visit by Moshe Dayan, who was a renowned antiquities thief. He showed up with a jeep full of paratroops, or whatever they were, with Uzi sub-machine guns.
MFL: Is this when he was still Defence Minister?
PH: When he was Defence Minister, and two years after the Six Day War. The Cambridge team had a girl of probably 18, and she'd been sending cards back to her family of the black-eyepatched hero of the Six Day War, but when he walked into the kitchen, she didn't recognise him.
[Laughter]
She walked into the kitchen, and she was in a bad mood. This site had an intercom, and so she's been screaming down the intercom 'Tony, there's some bastard with a black eyepatch up here!'[Laughter]
Everyone realised who it was, and they pulled all the ladders out of the trenches. They ran up to the kitchen, because she sounded very distressed, in time to see her chasing Moshe Dayan and his bodyguards across the area in front of the kitchen, with a rolling pin or a wooden spoon or something. They basically ran away; they drove off in their jeep. So, by the time I arrived, walking up the hill with my rucksack about an hour later, everyone was in a high state of excitement. Anyway, I spent most of the time in the site of Nahal Oren, which is a sort of cave site with an open area in front of it, and we were digging basically Upper Palaeolithic-Natufian and Pre-Pottery Neolithic holes. The same old story: we were looking for seeds and bones.
MFL: It's a classic site, really.
PH: A classic site, yeah. I suppose the most interesting thing about it, really, was the way it was run; it was run on a complete shoestring. I mean, Legge had some derisory sum of money to run the whole thing on. We got terribly hungry. It seems very funny in retrospect, but we used to sit around at night, and people would tell stories about meals they'd been taken to by their parents. What in normal circumstances would be very boring subject of conversation -- everyone sat there riveted! We all had these running sores. If you cut yourself digging or got mosquito bites, they'd go septic and run. They'd never heal. When I eventually got back to England, I went to see the doctor because these things wouldn't heal. He said, 'They're classic malnutrition sores'.
MCG: How long were you there for?
PH: I was there six weeks, but some of them had been there three months, probably.
MCG: That must have really coloured your opinion of why you were there.
PH: It's not that any of us thought it was odd. One can see with the benefit of hindsight that it was odd. The fact that we were all talking about meals that we'd been to in the past shows that one found it uncomfortable at the time. We worked incredibly long hours; we got up at 4.30 in the morning. I remember that we had eggs once a week, and on two occasions we got up in the morning to find that the mongoose had eaten them in the night. That was like a serious disaster: your one weekly egg was a real treat.
MFL: When you're young, you're more resilient, so it doesn't seem so bad.
PH: That was sort of like a baptism by fire, working on Higgs's projects. I could go on to tell you about by next experience with a Higgs project, because it's good.... If you had Higgs as a director of studies, you got dispatched to one of his PhD students to get your first-year tutorial, and I was sent off to Tony Legge. Higgs had this sort of little rabbit warren on the ground floor of the department, where people were crammed into tiny nooks and crannies. So the amount of space they had makes your surroundings look absolutely palatial. People would be studying big bone and seed assemblages on a table this big, which might be shared between two people.
MFL: Something less than four feet long!
PH: Yes, tiny. Legge and Dennell had desks, obviously. All my archaeology teaching was done by Tony Legge. Basically, the Cambridge system then at least, and probably is now, was tutorial-driven. So the lectures were pretty irrelevant -- most of them were bad -- and it didn't really matter because you got really good small-group teaching -- groups of two or three with postgrads [graduate students] who were really on the ball, really keen.
MFL: Could you explain that a bit more -- the distinction between the lectures and the tutorials -- and why the lectures were bad and how the tutorials were better?
PH: Well, I suppose the first thing is that our lectures would be in a class of 120. Archaeology, of course, was very popular. There were 120 people in our year, the first year. So a huge lecture theatre. But a lot of the older lecturers were really as dry as dust. Some of the younger ones were organised and keen, but at the end of the day, they couldn't really compete with small group tutorials. I mean, we were thrown in the deep end; Tony Legge had us in the first month reading Palaeolithic site reports in French. I'm not entirely sure about the wisdom of that, but you were vastly more engaged in what you were doing, doing that rather than hearing very general lectures.
MFL: And challenged to apply your intellect.
PH: Yes, well, probably.
[Laughter]
* * *
Copyright © assemblage 1998