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European Journal of Archaeology
A Conversation With Colin Renfrew (Professor Lord Renfrew of Kaimsthorn)
Anthony Harding
European Journal of Archaeology
2008 11: 143
DOI: 10.1177/1461957109106371
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A CONVERSATION WITH C OLIN R ENFREW
Anthony Harding
University of Exeter, UK
Colin Renfrew (born 1937) retired from the Disney Chair of Archaeology at
Cambridge University in 2004. After joining the Department of Archaeology at
Sheffield University as a lecturer in 1965, he became successively Professor of
Archaeology at Southampton and then, in 1981, Cambridge, where he was also
Master of Jesus College from 1986 to 1997. He was appointed a member of the
House of Lords (Upper House) in the British Parliament in 1991, to serve as a
‘working peer’ on the Conservative side, taking the title Baron Renfrew of
Kaimsthorn.
Although in the earlier part of his career Renfrew was regarded as one of the
leaders of the ‘New Archaeology’, his broad interests and wide intellectual frame-
work have meant that he has encompassed a huge range of trends in archaeology.
His published output is large and varied, and throughout his career he has been an
active fieldworker, with excavation projects in Greece and Britain. His books have
been translated into many languages, which, along with his persuasive powers of
oratory, mean that he has been extremely influential in the development of archae-
ological theory over the last 40 years or more, on both sides of the Atlantic, and not
only in the English-speaking world. Although he is an international scholar, his
contributions to the subject on a European level make him a subject of great inter-
est for readers of the EJA .
The interview was conducted in London on 15 October 2008 by Anthony
Harding (EAA President), who has also edited the resulting transcription.
Although a considerable number of scholars are referred to in the interview,
only those works that are specifically mentioned in the text are included in the
reference list.
An audio version of the interview is available on request to the EAA Secretariat,
and will be kept for the EAA’s archives.
European Journal of Archaeology Vol. 11(2–3): 143–170
Copyright © 2009 SAGE Publications ISSN 1461–9571 DOI:10.1177/1461957109106371
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(P ROFESSOR L ORD R ENFREW OF
K AIMSTHORN )
144
E UROPEAN J OURNALOF A RCHAEOLOGY 11 ( 2 – 3 )
Anthony Professor Renfrew, you’ve had a long, interesting and influential career.
Harding Would you like to start at the beginning and talk about how you started
(AH): in archaeology?
Colin As a schoolboy I’d already been interested in archaeology and had
Renfrew been on quite a lot of excavations, mainly with Sheppard Frere at
(CR): Canterbury. It didn’t seem that archaeology was very promising as a
career, so I went up to Cambridge University to study Natural Sciences,
which I had done at school and very much enjoyed. I enjoyed it at
Cambridge – it’s quite varied, you do a mix of subjects, physics, chem-
istry and biochemistry, and the history and philosophy of science. But I
realized after two years, as I got to the end of Part I of the course, that I
didn’t quite know what to do for Part II. I wasn’t really into mathemat-
ics, I wasn’t going to solve the problems of the cosmos by mathematical
analysis, and I didn’t want to spend my life analysing some organic
compound for its properties. I found archaeology more and more attrac-
tive, so I began to think about changing to archaeology in the third year.
I was lucky, being in St John’s College, that Glyn Daniel, whom I
already knew, was very easy to call on. It’s very easy to change course
in Cambridge, so I was able to change from Part I Natural Sciences
(which I passed reasonably enough), to Part II Archaeology.
AH: So then you decided you would carry on and do a PhD? With Glyn Daniel?
CR:
No, I asked Glyn Daniel for his suggestions of what might be a suitable
topic, and he’d got lots of questions relating to megaliths here and
there, which seemed to me a bit over-focused. I’d been to Greece on
Bob Rodden’s Nea Nikomedeia excavation, which I’d very much
enjoyed, and I’d been quite consciously looking out for a PhD topic,
looking at different possibilities. I was quite interested in the Scythians
and might have done something on them, but I saw the huge quantity
of Early Cycladic material in the museum in Athens, about which not a
great deal was known, and about which nothing really significant had
been written for some 40 years. I was attracted by the visual qualities of
the figurines, as they are very handsome. It all seemed very mysterious
and rather wonderful. So I wrote to a lot of people to take their advice,
people like John Evans and other specialists, and nearly all of them
wrote back politely and said that they thought this was a subject that
had been overlooked, and so I plunged into it.
My supervisor was Frank Stubbings, the lecturer on Prehellenic
archaeology in the Department of Classics, very nice, helpful, and con-
structive. I’d been to his lectures, which were a little bit traditional; he
was primarily a classicist. He knew a lot about Mycenaean pottery and
his coverage was very systematic. As a supervisor he was really excel-
lent. For instance he wrote a letter to Christos Doumas, who was
slightly older but basically a contemporary of mine, and who was then
employed by the Greek Archaeological Service. I went out to the British
School of Archaeology at Athens where Peter Megaw was Director;
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H ARDING : A CONVERSATION WITH C OLIN R ENFREW
145
Frank Stubbings contacted him, and everything went smoothly. So that
gave me a good start in the Cyclades.
AH:
So you did your doctoral work mainly on Early Cycladic archaeology?
CR:
It was entirely Early Cycladic (Early Bronze Age), but I was interested
in earlier periods as well, and I had the good fortune to find a site
which had been previously noticed to have obsidian; I realized it must
be Neolithic. That was Saliagos, and it was possible to excavate there. I
did a survey, where I visited all the known sites and tried to look for
other sites nearby, and that got me out and about in a very useful way.
I was able to study all the relevant objects in the National Museum in
Athens, and the museum card indices, but I think what really turned
out to be useful was that there had been lots of suggestions that the
Early Cycladic cultures had been influential in Iberia, in the Balkans,
and so on. I looked systematically into all those questions, and by the
time I’d looked into them I’d got to know the Cycladic material well,
and I could see that most of the resemblances were rather superficial
and didn’t add up to much. So when radiocarbon dates arrived, that
fed into the ‘radiocarbon revolution’. I’d already written some articles
dismissing the supposed links between the Cyclades and the Balkans
and the Vinˇa Culture, and the same thing with the Iberian element.
When the radiocarbon dates came through, and it became clear that the
Balkan cultures in question, and to some extent the Iberian cultures,
were earlier than the supposed parallels in the Cyclades, that seemed
to me altogether unsurprising.
AH:
So that was what broadened your horizons in the sense of getting you inter-
ested in the wider European panorama?
CR:
I was interested in Europe mainly because of the very good teaching in
Cambridge. Glyn Daniel was fascinated by megaliths all over Europe,
including Malta, so as a student I’d taken the chance to go to Malta and
look at the temples. I found them hugely impressive, and I looked quite
carefully at how to write a good essay or examination answer on the
age of the temples, what were the influences on them, and so on. I had
the opportunity of going to some of the great megaliths, the Cueva de
Menga at Antequera, the Cueva del Romeral, and so on, which I found
really impressive. I definitely caught Glyn Daniel’s enthusiasm for the
question, so I knew something about the background. I was interested
in that question and in the Beaker question, the Corded Ware and so on,
the big pan-European questions, at any rate in the Neolithic and Early
Bronze Age, and in the question of early metallurgy. And then I had the
good opportunity, just after graduating, of going round Europe with a
group of friends, when we got to Bulgaria and Romania and Hungary
and visited Vinˇa and Karanovo, where I was hugely impressed by the
stratigraphy. I could see that lots of current ideas about contact between
cultures didn’t work very well. So through that travel and through the
teaching, I was quite alert to questions of European prehistory.
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146
E UROPEAN J OURNALOF A RCHAEOLOGY 11 ( 2 – 3 )
Figure 1 . Colin Renfrew (left) with Stuart Piggott and Glyn Daniel at a Breton megalithic tomb,
June 1978. Photo: John F. Cherry.
AH: It was from that that you wrote the early papers which became famous, like ‘Colonialism
and megalithismus’, ‘Wessex without Mycenae’, and so on (Renfrew 1967, 1968).
CR: That’s right, these were papers which were definitely in my mind before
graduating. I’d done work on the Iberian Neolithic and Copper Age. I’d
looked carefully into the Wessex Culture, as most people did and still do.
I knew Stuart Piggott’s Wessex paper (Piggott 1938) rather well. So when
the radiocarbon dates started to arrive, it seemed to me unsurprising that
Stonehenge and the Wessex culture should be coming out earlier than the
Mycenaean link that had been proposed.
AH: Your first lecturing job was in Sheffield, and you had a Research Fellowship in
Cambridge as well.
CR: The new department in Sheffield was being led by Warwick Bray under the
overall leadership of Robert Hopper. I was able to have a foot in the high table
world of Cambridge, which I didn’t know, and also to be fully involved in
Sheffield, which was a growing department because of Hopper’s rather
expansive outlook (he was very good at playing the numbers game). So the
department grew and by the time it had four or five people it was taking off.
AH: Sheffield then developed into quite a big thing and had those big conferences.
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