When COVID-19 reached New Zealand, all my plans to continue excavating and attend conferences ground to a halt. So I turned my attention to writing my memoir, Digging Deep: a journey into South-east Asia’s past. Having kept a diary since 1955, I was able to pinpoint to the day various crossroads in my life that led me to archaeology. Since then, I have become interested in other archaeologist’s recollections. Indeed, in one of these I read that every archaeologist should take the time to recount their discoveries, and describe how they first became hooked. In The Past Masters, 12 pioneer archaeologists recalled how they began and what they looked back on as their particular achievements. Having begun my own serious studies in 1957, I knew most of them as the grand old men of the discipline – and, yes, all the authors were men. I just missed Gordon Childe by a week or so, as he left the Institute of Archaeology in London as I began, but his presence pervaded St John’s Lodge, and on my birthday on 19 October, I arrived for my class to the news that he had just killed himself by jumping off Govetts Leap in the Blue Mountains of Australia. I made sure I visited the very spot when I found myself there years later.
Stuart Piggott with Glyn Daniel and John Evans were the trio who led our team of aspiring prehistorians on a memorable visit to the Lipari islands in 1958. He had the good fortune to be encouraged by O G S Crawford and succeeded Childe in the Abercromby Chair at Edinburgh. Bob and Linda Braidwood once welcomed me to Chicago. Their excavations at Jarmo were front-page news in the late 1950s, set against Kathleen Kenyon’s fieldwork at Jericho as they debated the origins of agriculture in the Near East. John Mulvaney was the pioneer in his native Australia, responsible for pushing back human settlement there by thousands of years. Gordon Willey came to Cambridge on a sabbatical in about 1960, so I came across him too. When I was lucky enough to spend part of my doctoral research on a Danish government scholarship in Copenhagen, I was greatly helped by Carl Becker. At least two common themes prevailed. One was the help given by the older generation, and the other was luck.
Annus mirabilis
My most recent biography, however, concerns Sir Leonard Woolley and the year 1922. I am tempted to write about him because a recent email message from a young American archaeologist revealed that he had never heard of him. 1922 was an annus mirabilis for archaeology, seeing a conjunction of three discoveries in three great civilisations of the Old World. In November of that year, Howard Carter found the steps leading down to the tomb of the teenage pharaoh Tutankhamun. Sir John Marshall began his epic excavations at Mohenjo-Daro, and Leonard Woolley was opening what became 12 seasons that included finding royal tombs at Ur of the Chaldees in Iraq. Before the First World War, Woolley and Lawrence of Arabia had worked together, under conditions of great difficulty, at Carchemish, an Assyrian and Hittite centre that straddles the border between Turkey and Syria. Working as I have done for years as a guest in a foreign country, one is totally dependent on the goodwill of the local authorities for the necessary permits. Woolley worked under considerable duress during the twilight of the Ottoman Empire, as war clouds gathered and the Germans were nearby building the Berlin-to-Baghdad railway. So imagine Woolley’s dilemma when informed by the local Turkish administrator that he would not be given permission to continue digging. Woolley rapidly resolved the situation by holding a gun to the man’s head and informing him that he would be back in the square the following morning.
