![]() ![]() 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. ![]() My most recent biography, however, concerns Sir Leonard Woolley and the year 1922. ![]() One was the help given by the older generation, and the other was luck. 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. Gordon Willey came to Cambridge on a sabbatical in about 1960, so I came across him too. John Mulvaney was the pioneer in his native Australia, responsible for pushing back human settlement there by thousands of years. 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. Bob and Linda Braidwood once welcomed me to Chicago. He had the good fortune to be encouraged by O G S Crawford and succeeded Childe in the Abercromby Chair at Edinburgh. 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. Queen Pu-Abi’s headdress, with its gold poplar and willow leaves and lapis lazuli beads, dates to about 2550 BC. I made sure I visited the very spot when I found myself there years later. 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. 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. In The Past Masters, 12 pioneer archaeologists recalled how they began and what they looked back on as their particular achievements. 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. Since then, I have become interested in other archaeologist’s recollections. Having kept a diary since 1955, I was able to pinpoint to the day various crossroads in my life that led me to archaeology. So I turned my attention to writing my memoir, Digging Deep: a journey into South-east Asia’s past. When COVID-19 reached New Zealand, all my plans to continue excavating and attend conferences ground to a halt. ![]()
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