1. ENGLISH - David Price Williams PhD 1975

David Price Williams PhD 1975

I had never imagined myself as an archaeologist. In any case, in the early 60’s there were hardly any universities offering undergraduate courses in archaeology. I’d actually wanted to become a geologist, but alas I didn’t have the right ‘A’ levels. So I took a degree in ancient Middle Eastern Languages at the University of Wales instead, studying about eight of them in all, which turned out to be an extremely challenging experience and a most severe discipline. It was only at the end of my four year course I discovered there wasn’t much call for someone with my kind of expertise – being able to translate 10th century BC Canaanite inscriptions – so in desperation I turned to my Careers Advisory Service. After a searching hour in which the interviewer discovered I’d spent all my teenage years cycling around Wales looking at rocks, he announced ‘You’re a field man, aren’t you? You should combine your love of field work with your ancient languages and become a Middle Eastern archaeologist, and I know just the place you should go!’ And that’s how in October 1966 I found myself enrolled as a post-graduate at the Institute of Archaeology.

The Institute in those days was a very exotic establishment. There were no undergraduates; it was purely a research institution, one of a number which were part of the University of London, and it had moved from St John’s Lodge in Regents Park to its present purpose-built location only seven years earlier. It was peopled with some of the leading savants of the day – Prof W. F. (Peter) Grimes, who’d headed up the Museum of London, was its director. Prof Seaton Lloyd, who’d been Archaeological Adviser to the Directorate of Antiquities in Iraq, was head of Western Asia, and my own tutor was Peter Parr who’d conducted the first forensic excavations at Petra. Mortimer Wheeler, who had been Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India, was still on the board of governors. The whole place exuded a high-powered international flavour. For the first six months I was like a fish out of water until one day I woke up and thought, ‘I’m an archaeologist’. That was fifty years ago, and ever since then for me archaeology has become not just a study but a way of life.

The Institute enjoyed a very intimate atmosphere then, but all that was soon to change. The University passed a directive that we had to accept undergraduates. The suggestion was met with consternation by most of the staff; the idea of having to teach undisciplined students, fresh from school, was considered ludicrous. But as autumn 1968 loomed the notion was turning into a reality; come that October, we would have scores of first year students crowding through the doors of Gordon Square. The registrar at the time was Edward Pyddoke, with whom I had become particularly friendly, and it was he who suggested to me that the new student body should have a Student’s Union to represent them, as the rest of the University had, and he charged me with setting it up (I’d had some involvement with student politics during my undergraduate days at the University of Wales).

Student politics in the mid 1960’s were pretty aggressive. Britain was in the grip of dramatic protests against the Vietnam War and Europe was erupting with student demonstrations. There were towering figures in the international arena – Daniel Cohn-Bendit (known as Red Danny), the Marxist writer Tariq Ali and several others with very leftist tendencies. But as the new President of the Institute of Archaeology Students Union I had a rather quieter role to fulfil. The only problem I ever had to deal with was related to our union building, ULU, in Malet Street. A break-away movement from the London School of Economics, led by one David Adelstein, had exported their own protests and occupied ULU so that our students couldn’t eat there. I attended a Presidents Council meeting of the University and suggested the police should be called in to remove the demonstrators, which is what happened, and peace was restored – not very revolutionary, I’ll admit, but it worked.

While I was completing my PhD I was keeping myself alive by drawing book illustrations for various archaeological publications, which led to my first overseas placement at the Classical city of Knidos, in south-western Turkey (Price Williams 2015). There I rediscovered my natural aptitude for field work, especially field survey (Fig. 1), and this led swiftly to a two year posting with the Smithsonian Institution’s excavations at Tell Jemmeh, near Gaza. It was while I was there that I became fascinated by climatic change in the sub-tropics, the way in which rainfall and temperature affected human evolution, cultural and physical, in the mid-latitudes of the globe. The then great high-priest of environmental archaeology, Karl Butzer, had declared that there had been no change in these parts of the Earth. I couldn’t believe that, so, remembering my interests in geology, I set about proving him wrong. I assembled a team of specialists from different universities in Britain and the USA – palaeobotanists and palaeozoologists from Imperial College, Pleistocene geomorphologists from the School of Geography in Oxford, and prehistorians from the University of Pennsylvania – and we worked first near Gaza in the Eastern Mediterranean, then at the same latitude south in Southern Africa where we were dealing with a much larger archaeological canvas – almost five million years of it. In all, as a team, we were to work together for the best part of twenty years.

Figure 1 - David Price Williams levelling at Knidos, 1969, with the mainland city in the background (Photo: David Price Williams).

For me it has been the most remarkable experience, spending my whole working life in the study of the environment and human-kind. Our team conquered so many obstacles, especially in terms of methodology – the use of scanning electron microscopes (in the study of early flora, and particle shape in order to understand the history of sediments), the use of computers, and especially the new dating of African prehistory. For the fifteen years we worked in southern Africa we were based in Swaziland, a truly marvellous place to be, and in the end, for my pains, the Swazi Government appointed me Director of Antiquities for the Kingdom – shades of Mortimer Wheeler!

I have never for one single moment regretted becoming an archaeologist. I do remember when I started out, I was sitting at a dinner party next to a lady of dowager proportions and somewhat restricted intellect who, on being told I was an archaeologist, declaimed in her hoity-toity Home Counties voice, ‘Oh how fascinating! And what do you do in real life?’ The only problem has been that whenever anyone asks me how I became an archaeologist I have to reply in all truthfulness, ‘Well, I went to my Careers Advisory Service, and they sent me to the Institute!’

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