At first, I was just straightforward shocked. How could anyone think it ok to publish this sort of piece in 2021. Then I was annoyed by the inaccuracies in the excerpt I read (the piece was behind a paywall and I refuse to subscribe to read rubbish). Finally, I realised that the two ‘issues’ are linked.

Interpretation in archaeology is a changeable feast. Views that were once acceptable are refined and reconsidered in light of contemporary thinking. New information adds subtlety and events or attitudes are seen in new ways. There is no universal truth, no ‘right’ answer. Students of archaeology learn as much about how we study the past, as they do about what may, or may not, have gone on. They develop new ways of seeing the world around them. They think about people, places, and material culture in different ways. Horizons are expanded, actions seen differently, landscapes unpicked. A degree in archaeology is like a portal to another world. Many worlds, in fact.

But those worlds are rooted in carefully curated data and method. You learn to be flexible, you learn to change your mind, and you learn to be discerning.

Whether or not we need more archaeologists (perhaps a topic for another blog?), I fear that the reduction in opportunity for everyone to engage with the discipline is eroding the stability of society. Trite, ill-informed, words that stir the emotions are easy. Curiously, the authors rarely stay around to participate in any ensuing discussion. Whether you get your idea of the past from school, television, college, newspapers, or magazines it matters that it be based in contemporary wisdom. Of course, if we get rid of enough of those who study the past, or if we sideline their discipline, then contemporary wisdom can be flawed.

Right now, I feel we are at a cusp. We still value the role of the specialist in providing the building blocks on which we base our views of life. But, and I am not sure why, apart from a general feeling that it is often easier to ignore the sometimes inconvenient details, there seems to be a move towards poorly informed attitudes based on gut reactions related to possible outcomes. Perhaps we all feel more uncertain about the future in the emerging post-pandemic/globally warming world of ours. But no matter how strongly we wish to believe that we can continue our current lifestyles if we shut our eyes to the unviability of existing consumption levels, it just won’t work. We do need to engage with the science.

The same applies to the study of the past.

Well-informed archaeology (in terms of both data and technique), can be used to make sure that our assumptions about the present are rooted in reality. Whether I like an argument or not, we do it no favours if it is based on inaccurate information.

We might not always get the past we’d wish. We might not always welcome the present we deserve. You might not want to be an archaeologist. You might not care about what went on in the centuries and millennia before the twenty-first century. But to cut back on opportunities to learn about and study the discipline of archaeology is always going to be shortsighted.

One of the really fun things about my work has been the opportunity to work with artists on reconstructions of the past. Usually, but not always, these have focussed on Mesolithic communities. I’ve been doing it for nearly 40 years, and it has been so interesting trying to bring the world of prehistory to life. I thought it might be interesting to review some of them here. Of course, no reconstruction drawing is ever going to be 100% accurate. They can only ever be used to give an idea of how things might have been.  Nevertheless, in their changing styles and information, they provide a wonderful reflection on how my archaeology has changed over the years.

The first image I worked on was a depiction of the Mesolithic site at Kinloch, Rum, drawn for the Glasgow Herald by Marion O’Neil in January 1985. Kinloch got quite a bit of publicity and went on to inspire several images.

In all of these pictures you can see that people, tasks, and shelters are prominent, though some of the detail is left vague.

In 1994, Alan Braby drew a series of images for a general publication about Mesolithic Scotland. While many pictures focussed on specific aspects of life and details of settlement, others were much more general landscape views. For the first time, I was thinking about the world inhabited by the Mesolithic communities of Scotland.

The Mesolithic site at Fife Ness did not offer evidence of a full-blown shelter. In 1998, Mary Kemp Clarke drew this image to focus on the resources and the suggestion that the site had been occupied in the autumn. The nature of individuals is left for the viewer to discern.

Jump forward to 2006 and Phil Austin completed three images moving from the detailed to a broader landscape view for the Scotland’s First Settlers project which was published as a Scottish Archaeological Internet Report.

In 2012 I was able to work with Dominic Andrews regarding a Mesolithic Panorama for the displays at the Tomb of Eagles Museum in South Ronaldsay. People, while providing considerable action are less prominent and the overall focus is upon a landscape view, giving a good idea of the world within which the community lived.

In the same year, Brian Lee worked on images for a Historic Environment Scotland guidebook to Orkney for which I was writing text. He somehow captured both close detail and landscape in his series of images of different periods.

Most recently, I have been working with Jan Dunbar to bring to life the different periods of settlement evidenced by the work of Mesolithic Deeside along the River Dee in Aberdeenshire. The detail here is wonderful, though the settlement itself is well hidden within the landscape. The real star is the river as you will see from the main report. The full results are to be published as another Scottish Archaeological Internet Report.

There are so many things I love about these images. You can see how my focus has shifted from the people to the landscape. You can see how our ideas about clothes have evolved (it is interesting to me that we always depict our characters clothed – there is no direct evidence for this and while the inhabitants of many parts of the globe have gone clothed, there are locations where the wearing of complex costumes was seen as disadvantageous, even in cold climates). I’ve always tried not to be too gender specific in task divisions. And you can see so much about ideas of complexity, sophistication and comfort. In many ways the production of a reconstruction drawing is a minefield, but they make us think, and, in my opinion, the worries are well worth the fun!

I love writing, I love playing with words to make them sound right and convey meaning. But I’ve become increasingly aware that the way I hear them inside my head, and the meanings I am trying to communicate, may not be same as the meanings and sounds received by those who read them.

There has been an interesting debate over the use of the word ‘ancestor’. I have to confess that I love the word ancestor. Not only does it sound nice, but it ties us back to the past, to those I study. I’ve used it a lot. But perhaps I have been sloppy. I have come to realise how the understanding I have of ‘ancestor’ is a very privilaged one. I have never had it turned against me. Coming from a family who have set down roots (and uplifted them) around the world, I have also developed a loose appreciation of ancestor and place.

When I say ‘our prehistoric ancestors’, I’m not thinking of a direct blood lineage, I’m thinking of a shared experience in inhabiting a place. Even with that in mind, I realise that I am making all sorts of assumptions. I am, for example, assuming that I have a right to feel at home in a place. I’m also assuming that my love of place is the same as a hypothetical love of place that may (or may not), have existed among the prehistoric communities several millennia ago. Perhaps they hated the hills and coasts of their homeland. Perhaps they were starving, or cold, or threatened in some other way, and wished only for a safe haven somewhere else. And even where we might share an appreciation of location, it is likely to be based on very different needs and values.

For me, using the word ancestor has always emphasised the links, the humanity, of past communities. I see it as a reminder that they were people just like us and with needs and fears, just like us. I have argued that you do not need to be a blood relation of those who built, or used a stone circle, to have a commonality of purpose when you visit it today in order to rebalance your life and regain some inner peace, or even just because it is there and people tell you to go see it! You don’t even have to be of close family heritage, if you live in a place, and love it and regard it as home.

But of course, I have never spelt this out, or discussed it in detail with others. And now I find that, though I might use the term ancestors to be inclusive, and to demonstrate a shared heritage, many see it as exclusive, a sign of divisive heritage. It has been used to exclude people.

It is a bit depressing, though also a reminder that we can all be naïve. We need to be careful how we communicate. It is also a reminder of the way in which we can all bend words to meanings that suit us, while others stick to more literal definitions to guide them. Of course, the meaning of words is always changing, but new meaning has to become generally accepted by a wide community before we can use it without definition.

I’d love to reclaim ‘ancestor’ but I fear that day may be a long way off.

In a way, this is all part of a movement which I have recently been trying to follow (albeit in a desultory way). Decolonising Archaeology is (to me) about becoming more aware of our subconscious biases, the inherent contradictions of our words, and the work of others. A good example would be the (hypothetical) instance where a radical new discovery in some remote desert is trumpeted in the British press, only for local archaeologists to point out that it has long been under investigation by other academics. It happens. One thing we do share with people around the world (and in earlier times) is our interest in the remains of past communities and also our ability to study them. It has been going on, the world around, for generations. In the west, archaeology has a long history of ‘drop in and dig’. It was a staple of my archaeological education. Whether working on a remote island, or in an exotic rainforest – there can be good reasons to bring in outside experience, but they are never reasons to exclude local wisdom. Today, I hope, we are more collaborative and inclusive of the contributions of others.

Another example could lie in the words we use to describe earlier lifestyles. It is surprising how many publications still discuss stone tool technology as ‘primitive’ or ‘simple’, when it involves a long chain of complex decision making that few of us could achieve today. Just as the officers and crew of HMS Beagle were not able to recognise the success of the sophisticated lifestyle of the communities they observed along the straits of southern Patagonia because the measures by which nineteenth century Londoners judged ‘civilisation’ did not work in the conditions of Patagonia, so it is impossible for us to assess past lifestyles. We should avoid qualitative language.

Archaeology has grown in so many ways. Its roots are complex, and in Britain they include elements of evolutionary and colonial thought that I’d prefer not to be associated with today. I can’t deny them. But I can try to make sure that I have moved beyond them. My archaeology is, I hope, wider, more thoughtful, and more inclusive than it has been for many in the past. Just as I now work to communicate to everyone, not just fellow academics, so I am also trying to learn to be aware of the pitfalls of the written word.

Archaeology in the twentieth century has its own, contemporary, hurdles, and some can be tied with those of the past. Our worship of hyperbole at the expense of reality, for example, may help us to finance or publicise our work, but can also serve to emphasise the contribution of western teams at the expense of local experience. How many of us work in areas where we do not understand the language?

We have become a bit more reflexive. Self-assessment is taught in school and at university. It is an important skill, and one we should try not to drop as we get older, though the results can be disturbing. For me, I am hoping that it is not too late to teach an old dog new tricks. I still aim for wide communication, and I would love to be inclusive, but maybe I need a bit more help and discussion than I thought. I think it will still be fun!

I love academic conferences. I find that people are divided into conference-goers and conference-avoiders. I am an unashamed conference-goer. I love mixing with people to whom I do not have to explain my weird interest in subjects that other people find boring such as the Mesolithic or stone tools. I love listening to people present things that really fire them up. I love the intellectual parrying of question and answers as well as stream-of-consciousness thoughts among the audience. And I love settling down for the evening with some good food and wine, knowing that a few hours of interesting discussion lie ahead.

One of my favourite events is the Mesolithic in Europe conference which takes place every five years in a different centre of Mesolithic research. I have attended most of the meetings since 1975 and I can now look out for old friends as well as new colleagues, in addition to the intellectual stimulation of the week. 2020 should have seen a September gathering in Toulouse, France.

So, this year has not been easy in that respect.

Of course, it has been much harder for the organising committee than it has for me. Early on they had to take the decision to hold the conference online with a knock-on impact on conference organisation, attendees, papers, everything. Thankfully, I had nothing to do with the physical effort of getting everything online and making sure that the systems worked. But the impact of transferring a week of intellectual endeavour to the ether surprised me.

Throughout lockdown I have been giving, and listening to, online lectures roughly once a week. It has been an important way to connect with others and maintain some learning and thinking. I have enjoyed it. I feel that it worked, and many people found the lectures interesting (hopefully). A whole conference was something else altogether. Perhaps I was just naïve, but I was surprised at how tiring I found it to participate.

First of all, I had to devote most of the previous week to watching presentations. Even then I did not manage to see them all. There were just so many contributions! Thankfully, the conference organisers have taken the decision to leave material online for longer than the duration of the meeting. Watching recorded presentation after recorded presentation over a period of several hours becomes very intense. It allows you to get a fantastic overview, but it is exhausting.

Then there were the discussions. Discussion took place in real time, according to a strict timetable, allowing one to get a whiff of the atmosphere of a conference hall. It was easy to submit questions, and, though, as in any conference session there were more questions than could be asked, the system worked well. In some cases I felt I was earwigging a discussion between specialists, in other cases I wanted to (and did) join in. It was pretty all-embracing if you tried to take advantage of every session. Yet, after a while, a feeling of isolation crept in; I was alone – it felt quite lonely and I missed the banter of the coffee break (or whispered comment). My cats were appreciative but not forthcoming.

As a seasoned Mesolithic aficionado, I was both co-presenting and, in a different session, co-organsing material. That was a bit stressful, not least because the international version of Zoom proved to have quirks that I had not encountered before, resulting in my computer system crashing. At one point my co-organisers and I were reduced to our valiant PhD student colleague who held the fort admirably while we rebooted hardware. In the end I was able to take questions for my paper and I did manage to play my part in the discussion of our session. It was stressful, and all felt a bit curtailed without the usual pub discussion afterwards, but we did achieve a lot. And it will be published.

I’m glad to have taken part. And relieved that the organising team chose not to just cut and run. There are big advantages to virtual conferences. Your travel and subsistence bills are negligible, and conference attendance was free. Access was available around the world, enabling many who would not normally participate to join our Mesolithic fellowship – hopefully we have not put them off. there was a great variety of papers, and I got the opportunity to look at them all without running between venues and yet somehow missing the vital beginnings to papers. Everything will be published – not surprisingly in an on-line publication which will be openly available to all. That is brilliant (if you like the Mesolithic).

There are also disadvantages to going online… Quite apart from the stress, isolation, and exhaustion, I could not help feeling that many of the papers were very ‘safe’. Perhaps because this was the first online conference for most of us, it seemed that people tended to stick to overview presentations of existing research rather than cutting-edge coverage of future plans or new techniques. That is not to say that there were not some contentious papers and discussions, but there was, perhaps, a little less heightened opinion than one is used to.

Nevertheless, I learnt much, and thought even more. I am so glad that the conference went ahead, and we all owe a big thanks to the organisers who took on the unenviable task of altering plans and making sure that everything worked. It cannot have been easy. Overall, the experience was great, though I have to say that I prefer to attend my conferences in person. I have high hopes for the next – to be held in Italy in due course. Fingers crossed!

Meanwhile, there is another advantage to these themed conferences. The publications are fantastic, and most have appeared at regular intervals. They provide brilliant statements of the development of research over the years.  I am much looking forward to the appearance of this one. Hold on – I need to write my own contribution first!

I have never completed a PhD.

It is a mark of the way in which we think about knowledge that I am usually addressed as Doctor (except by correspondents from the USA who call me Professor). My initial contact with people therefore often consists of me trying to ‘downgrade’ my qualifications. As I do not actually work for a university, I also find that I usually need to expend some effort on my lack of affiliation. That has got easier in recent years as I now have honorary research status at two institutions (The University of Aberdeen and the Institute for Northern Studies, University of the Highlands and Islands).

My lack of a doctorate has never bothered me – if it did, I would have pulled my socks up and put something together long ago. I did start one immediately after graduation, but it was largely because ‘that was what you did’, and the topic was amazingly badly chosen. I gave it up as soon as the first excuse presented itself (an opportunity to run a big excavation), and it was the best career choice I ever made.

What does bother me is other people’s attitude to it.

There is a tacit assumption that you cannot be anything in archaeology (academia?) without a PhD. Now, I fully accept that it is very difficult to get a job in any sort of research or academic archaeology today without the qualification. I am one of the last dinosaurs who has managed to steer my way through a successful (to me), career without completing a thesis. It is not a career choice I would recommend to the graduates of today. But I did manage it. If you look at my publication list, you will see that I have many papers and quite a few books. Some are academic, others more popular. I’ve been helped by not having a day job to take up my time. When I came home from fieldwork my day job was to write it up, unlike many of my colleagues who had to spend their time teaching, or curating, or administrating. I may have lacked the security of a job but being self-employed has allowed me to pursue the career I wished and make a real contribution to my area of interest. I’ve been extremely lucky. Most of my output is peer reviewed, and though I know I have not always been in total agreement with my colleagues, I also believe that ideas are there to challenge. My work would not be worth anything if it did not make people think.

I have also been able to access some useful research funding – from private, NGO, and academic foundations. Now, I do admit that gets more difficult with every year that passes. But I am not sure whether it is because of the current financial climate (even pre-covid), or whether it is because the completion of a thesis acts as a guarantee that one is capable of undertaking work of a certain standard. Hopefully, my publication record also confirms that.

I do not think that I am less without a doctorate. In fact, I’d turn one down if offered an honorary doctorate (a discussion I have had more than once). It would feel like an admission that I was somehow incomplete without Dr in front of my name. And I do not think I am.

I’m flattered that people seek to give me what is, after all, a mark of respect. And I really don’t mean to denigrate the hard work that those who do complete PhDs have put in to researching and producing their doctorate. It just seems strange that there is an (incereasing – it seems to me) assumption that if you have published the odd paper, or given the odd lecture, then you must have a doctorate.

It came as a surprise when people first labelled me as ‘academic’ – I’d always regarded myself as someone who just played around with the interesting ideas and puzzles that archaeology throws at us. I did go on to work for a major university for a few years (thank you Aberdeen for giving me that opportunity), but I have to say that, if you can wangle it, the life of the self-employed consultant is so much better. Committees, forms to fill in, bureaucracy – you need only take on those that really grab you and for the rest of the time you get to focus on the problems that you love. If you find yourself stuck in a rut you have only yourself to blame and you can make sure it does not happen again.

I may well be a throwback to some earlier time. But I’d like to feel that I am also a reminder that you do not always need to jump through the hoops to succeed. Those of us without a PhD also have a useful contribution to make. We might not be professors; we might not gear our lives towards the academic Research Excellence Framework system by which UK universities are assessed (or equivalent in other countries). But our lectures can be worth listening to, our work can be worth reading. We work hard, many of us are consummate communicators, and we can make useful contributions to conferences and other symposia.

Even more – we have fun!

We have seen some great archaeological headlines over the past few months. A visible presence in the news certainly keeps people interested in archaeology. While that is undoubtedly good for the profession, it does have caveats. Sloppy, or overoptimistic, reporting can backfire, and I am afraid that, to my mind, several recent news reports have been flawed.

I am not alone in this and the study of exaggerated interpretation has, itself, become the subject of some rather interesting archaeological investigation. Gordon Barclay and Kenny Brophy have recently published a paper (free to download) that tracks the progression of an interpretation from possible to certain through the course of various publications. They are concerned with ideas relating to the centrality of Stonehenge in the Neolithic of the British Isles and they follow them from academic to public arena. They go further to consider the ways in which some have added a layer of contemporary political thinking to the archaeological story. It is an excellent paper and their phrase ’interpretive inflation’ should become part of the archaeological lexicon.

It is a cautionary tale for any archaeologist. How many of us have not seen our ideas picked up and developed into something out of all academic recognition? In the ‘good old’ days journalists were usually happy to work hand in hand over several days with their archaeological informants and this provided the opportunity to control the extent to which one’s ideas became exaggerated, or even twisted, when presented to a difference audience. Today, sadly, time is shorter and that sort of personal attention to detail is often lacking. On many occasions, journalists work from prepared press releases rather than direct personal contact.

Of course, we all wish to be recognised for the contribution of our research. But even where we are not, I do not feel that we can abdicate responsibility when archaeological ideas run out of hand.  We need to be very aware of the possibility for interpretive inflation and try to avoid it. It is a dangerous process and one that does no favours for archaeology as a profession.

It is, indeed, a process that can, if we are not careful, occur within our own research papers.

It is natural to wish to tell a good story. And natural to want to see our ideas proved. Sadly, vindication can only come with further research, whether by ourselves or at the hands of others.  While it is tempting to progress from ‘possibly’ in our results section to ‘certainly’ in the conclusions, it is not honest.

One course of action we can take to control this is to be careful of our wording and not to let our enthusiasm run away with us when writing up our research. Another step is to be more careful when we word press releases and work with the media. To present everything through hyperbole is lazy and needless. The world may have drifted into a place where things have to be the biggest, best, or earliest, but it has not always been so. One of the strengths of archaeology is the way in which it highlights the glorious detail of the everyday. There is value in the ordinary and it is a story that we, as archaeologists, can tell. History, ironically, is often hidebound by the constraints of those whose voices were significant enough to survive. Archaeology may not have the voices, but the record of material culture and alteration to the world that we pick up is broader and more representative.

That is not to say that archaeology provides an unbiased record. Of course, there is still considerable bias. Often, but not always, it is the material culture of the important or significant that will survive down the millennia. Nevertheless, as archaeologists we can start to untangle the web of hierarchy and it is part of our job to emphasise the value of the ordinary and the under-represented. How boring the human record would be if told only through the point of view of one facet of society. We have privileged access to the past diversity of society, and we should be careful to make sure that we represent it.

Barclay and Brophy continue to discuss the apparent use of archaeological interpretation to bolster contemporary politics, in this case the Brexit debate. The mixing of archaeology and politics is hardly new, and, for me, should really be the topic of a separate blog. I’ve written on it elsewhere, in a volume to be published next year. In brief, though it is a difficult field and one that can, if mishandled, provide a toxic legacy, I don’t think we can, or should, avoid it. We cannot censor those aspects of present society wherein archaeology is a part. If it has a role to play, then it plays that role everywhere. But we do need to be careful, and we need to aim for balance. We cannot curtail or stifle other people’s views, but we can make sure that good base-line data is always available and we can work to bring alternative interpretations to the fore.

This leads back to my original point. If we limit the content of archaeology in the media to hyperbole, we limit the widespread understanding of the value of archaeology. We limit information about the past and, ultimately, we limit the role that we, as archaeologists play. It is a dangerous path to take.

I have had first-hand experience of this.  ‘Britain’s Lost Atlantis’ was coined as a headline by David Keys to cover the first archaeological indications of the area we now know as Doggerland, when a small flint scraper was found on the bed of the North Sea in the late 1980s. It was an eye-catching headline. Since then it has been used numerous times; an internet search yields a surprising diversity of newspaper reports that make use of it, the most recent published in June 2019, as well as several television and radio programmes. Of course, the original research is long since superseded by more recent finds and the application of more modern techniques. That is how it should be after all this time. The original headline is, to my mind, long superseded also, it hardly suggests anything new. There is much to tell, but I’d like to see a new headline. And it is not Atlantis!

Rather than build unrealistic expectations, or even dice with the onset of public boredom, how much better to focus on the detail. What is new? What new techniques have been deployed? Where? What can they tell us that previous work was lacking? With just a little bit of imagination, and not much effort, we could build a picture of the excitement of being an archaeologist, the way in which we use data to build an interpretation, and the ongoing contribution of continued investigation. That way we set up the scene not just for our results, but also for improved understanding of the work and significance of archaeology. That can only stand us in good stead when issues of funding, or recruitment, come to the fore.

The perils of interpretive inflation are salutary for any archaeologist. Impact may be king – but there is only a limited number of times that we can be the first to see wondrous things or discover the biggest and the best. Every time I read an account that highlights the unusual nature of a discovery, I feel a little bit like Tinkerbell when she explains that whenever someone doubts the existence of fairies then a fairy dies. How long before our use of hyperbole starts to kill a little bit of some of the ordinary life of the past.

We don’t want that.