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Colin Renfrew - Phylakopi: Writing up the report (45/79)

213 views · Published 19 September 2017 · 7:09 · Indexed 20 September 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2017 · Science & Technology

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To listen to more of Colin Renfrew’s stories, go to the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3SzEpbhIMI&list=PLVV0r6CmEsFxuotjBVsYwbMI_I94P6Sq7

Baron Renfrew of Kaimsthorn (1937-2024) was a British archaeologist known for his work on the dispersal of the Proto-Indo-Europeans and the prehistory of PIE languages. He was Disney Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge as well as Master of Jesus College and Director of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. [Listener: Paul Bahn] 

TRANSCRIPT: That turned out to be a very interesting site because it had different things. We had fortification walls that we had to date more securely. We had a deep sounding to get down to the early Bronze Age but the most interesting thing was this quite complicated shrine or sanctuary, which had quite a complicated stratigraphy. It had been damaged or destroyed and then it had been partly rebuilt and so we had to try and get the - the pottery sequence established and so on. And so that was a really profitable excavation that took a lot of thinking about in the writing up precisely because we'd done the excavation quite thoroughly, we'd got our stratigraphy straight, we'd drawn the sections, the finds were all properly recorded. A lot of them were very broken so we had to do a lot of mending of the pottery and of the figurines and the joins seemed to come from all over the place. The pot mender would suddenly find one figurine from here joining with one from there, but they were perfectly secure joins so we had to keep track of all those to find which joined with which, which helped us in some of the stratigraphic interpretation but it took a long time to - to get sorted, and so that gradually turned, the excavation report was being written, but in the end it turned into a book that was as much about methodology as it was just direct reporting, and so I edited the book. Of course, we had all kinds of specialists, Elizabeth French, the great authority on Mycenaean figurines, described the figurines. Penelope Ann Mountjoy did the specialism on the Mycenaean pottery which is a very abstruse field which had been well beyond my abilities, and so it ended up being called "The Archaeology of Cult", with the subtitle, "The Sanctuary at Phylakopi", and I began by trying to set out in a more coherent way, how one might hope to recognise a sanctuary or a cult building meaning a building that had been built for religious purposes and how would you hope to recognise such a thing? So I started off in a more deductive way talking about places which had been set apart for religious ritual and what sort of criteria would you have and one of the things is that you have visual ways of heightening awareness and using other senses so that you expect there to be prominent positions where things have iconographic significance will be placed, then maybe you have music, maybe you have special things to eat and drink in the course of these rituals. Maybe you have censers with things that you burn and so on. Clearly you have the possibility of a congregation but also you may have places that are rather apart as a sort of sacred place, or maybe you have great groups of people. So I tried to think all that through and I think was able to show that with these rather strange finds, it really had to be a cult place, and I remember when I gave my inaugural lecture in - in Cambridge, John Chadwick was - who was a great authority on things Mycenaean, was heard to observe, not by me but when he left, saying - oh, must have just been a toyshop, and that actually, if you're an archaeologist, presents quite a difficult problem. Are you really sure what these things mean and, indeed, play and toys do have a very special role in human existence; if one wants to be rather serious about it, there's a wonderful book called "Homo Ludens" that talks about the different ways in which humans play, and how play is so serious and, after all, you see that with, say, football matches, football matches in Turkey, people have lost their lives in the riots afterwards and so on just as in the chariot races in - in what is now Turkey, in - in Byzantium in Constantinople, there were sometimes riots leading to deaths after the royal chariot races. So there's a whole field there about the archaeology of religion which never had been very systematically developed, so this excavation report was the opportunity of doing that and that, I think, is quite an important point because one of the principles of the new archaeology, so-called new archaeology or processual archaeology, which had emerged in America in the 1960s, as I mentioned earlier, Lewis Binford was one of the key figures and his great book, "New Perspectives in Archaeology"...

Read he full transcript on [https://www.webofstories.com/play/colin.renfrew/45].

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