• 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

* * *

They were immensely stimulating. The atmosphere Finley created was staggeringly stimulating. I think that for me was a very, very formative influence because you were being exposed to this huge debate going on about issues such as the nature of the ancient economy, the extent to which the ancient economy was somehow dramatically different from anything in the modern world, the old formalist-substantivist debate, and so on. That was a really lucky break for me because at a time when the archaeology department was pretty boring, I was getting huge stimulus from things going on there. And then Finley retired, and ancient history became much less interesting, and it took a while for Snodgrass to build up Classical Archaeology, although it became very, very distinctive. He produced, then, a really impressive group of postgrads who were people who really can do both ancient history and archaeology, which is maybe one of the most important things that has happened in the study of Mediterranean antiquity in a long time. I suppose in 1979 Ian Hodder started getting this group of PhD students coming in, which included Mike Parker Pearson, Henrietta Moore, Sheena Crawford. Chris Tilley was there all ready. Chris in many ways, probably unfairly, gets treated as part of that cohort. He started out under David Clarke, and he was actually ploughing these furrows all on his own, before Ian Hodder came and before large numbers of other people turned up to join the gang. At that point, the archaeology department became very interesting, because of a group of really very active PhD students. From my point of view, it became a lot more interesting the following year when Todd Whitelaw came, who would be someone I would have a lot more in common with than with Ian's students, and Todd, as you probably know, has a ferocious intellect.

MFL: Is it true that you coined the term 'cogi-playgroup', as Mike Parker Pearson said in his interview for assemblage?

PH: I don't remember that. We used to call them the 'Coggies'.

MFL: From 'cognitive'?

PH: Yes. When they first appeared on the public arena at the first public TAG, in Sheffield, they were calling themselves 'cognitive archaeologists', and we used to call them 'the coggies'. I'm not quite sure why. I might have a vague idea that it was partly a play on the fact that at that time Private Eye had this strip cartoon called 'The Cloggies', which was the story of 'everyday' clog-dancing folk from the north of England, and I think 'Cloggies'-'coggies' was the reason. So those of us who weren't part of the charmed circle used to take the mick out of the charmed circle. In many ways, the interesting thing about that time -- to give them their due, they were an immensely active and stimulating bunch, they were of tremendous value -- but for the first time for me, the archaeology department at Cambridge was an exciting place to be, which it never had been before, because Andrew Sherratt and David Clarke taught you out of the context of the department.

MCG: So it made a centre of the department itself rather than relying on individual lecturers?

PH: Yes. The amusing thing about it in a way, historically I've found, is that they were very reminiscent of Higgs's style of archaeology group because, as with Higgs,they had their seminars and they were a sort of loyalty test: you had to be a believer to attend, so they were entirely inturned and highly evangelical. For someone who had been there in the early '70s, there was a feeling of history repeating itself.

MCG: Did you feel that this time it was a divide that was based upon the theoretical and methodological approach, rather than a divide based upon individual and their particular pet subjects? Did you feel that you were being excluded just because you weren't working in that lecturer's area of the discipline?

PH: I think that the difference from the early '70s -- I would perceive a difference in that Geoff Bailey, who was the heir to the bone room, and Ian Hodder never seemed to have any personal animosity towards each other, and that appeared to be to me very different to what had gone on in the early '70s.

MFL: Do you think that they were just living in different worlds really?

PH: Who?

MFL: Hodder and Bailey. And that's why there was no animosity.

PH: Largely, in a sense there was very little formal debate. Lots of debate happened in the pub between various 'coggie' postgraduates and people like myself, Jim Lewthwaite, Pete Rowley-Conwy, and Todd Whitelaw, who weren't believers. A fair amount of argument went on. Lots. For a while John O'Shea was at Cambridge and he was a formidable opponent of what they wanted to do, because he, like Todd Whitelaw, they both have some razor-sharp brains that home in on intellectual weaknesses very quickly.