The interlocutors were Michael Lane (MFL), Paul Halstead (PH), Mel Giles (MCG), and John Barrett (JCB).
Robin Dennell vs the KGB
PH: I'll tell you about [Robin] Dennell now. We ended up, several of us, myself, Peter Rowley-Conwy, Chris Chippendale, Colin Ridler -- all people who are still in archaeology -- going off to dig in Bulgaria with Robin Dennell at the end of our first year.
[Robin Dennell is also now at the University of Sheffield. -- ed.]
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PH: There are two very memorable things -- in fact, several memorable things-- about digging with Dennell. The first thing is the economic circumstances in which it was done, again done on a shoestring. Dennell had gone out planning to run a three-month field season with a team of a dozen, with, I think, 144 tea bags and two large jars of coffee. You can probably believe that, knowing him now.
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PH: Shortly after we got there, he'd come up with some deal with the local blacksmith, whereby he was going to make....
MFL: Now we're all afraid! John Barrett just gave us a question to ask him.
[Laughter]
PH: The blacksmith made sieve frames for Dennell, which he thought he could sell back in Cambridge to McBurney at a profit, and Dennell traded all his tea and coffee for these things. What we ended up doing was, we used to recycle the tea bags. They used to hang on the barbed wire fence next to where the tents were to dry between uses, so when we made tea, we used to use either one primary, two secondary, or three tertiary tea bags. And because we got the water out of the stream running through where we were camping, it had these tiny freshwater shrimps in it, which you couldn't see until the water boiled, when they turned pink. So we used to have tea with these pink blobs in it.
MFL: You were certainly getting your trace elements that way.
PH: Yes, I guess so. That was quite entertaining.
MFL: Who was funding projects like that one at this time?
PH: Well, Higgs had money from various sources. The little ghetto in the ground floor of the Cambridge department is called the 'bone room', and it's where Higgs and his acolytes all crowded. They were on a thing called the British Academy Major Research Project into the Origins of Agriculture, so they had British Academy funding. I think they had quite good funding, and for the dig in Israel they had money from the BM [British Museum], and other things, but the individual field projects involving PhD students and undergraduates were run on a tiny shoestring -- trivial sums of money, a few hundred quid [pounds] for a field season involving lots of people.
MFL: Did any of this come out of the director's pocket? I ask only because it sometimes does these days. Or don't you know?
PH: No, no, they were postgrads. I mean they were thoroughly impecunious. Yeah, they probably were [paying]. They would have been running them at a loss, because there had to be a vehicle, and that would be four times their grants, I suppose. The other funny thing was that in 1971, Bulgaria was behind the Iron Curtain, and I think we imagined that the KGB were watching one's every move. Robin Dennell in particular was completely paranoid about the KGB. The last site we worked on, we went to stay in a village called Muselievo up in the north of Bulgaria, quite near the Danube, where we camped on the village green -- us and the local geese. It was a brilliant place, and the villagers were really friendly! Our first night there in the bar, we met the local KGB man. He introduced himself and explained that he stopped work at five o'clock, after which he was basically interested in plying us with drinks.
MFL: Was he also an antiquarian?
PH: Not at all -- he was interested in a blonde PhD student from Sheffield, which was his reason why he plied us with drinks.
[Laughter]
MFL: So he was interested in things younger?
PH: Yes, very much so. They were really, really helpful. Pete Rowley-Conwy had his birthday while we there, and the local collective farm got some westerns sent down from Sofia to the local cinema for his benefit. They were really nice, and they treated us to appalling plum brandies, slivovitz and stuff like that.
[Laughter]
We had a great time there, but Robin was very, very concerned about the KGB, and he was convinced that they were bugging his tent. It never made sense to the rest of us, because all you had to do was stand outside people's tents, and you could hear everything they were saying on the inside, anyway.
MFL: And there were plenty of bugs on the inside of the tent!
PH: Yes, there were, indeed. That was sort of fun.
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