Archaeology – creating cultural value

The week this magazine comes out Neil Redfern will become the new director at the Council for British Archaeology (CBA). He’s excited about the prospects

Archaeology to me is about us today, and not necessarily about the past. It’s a way you ask questions about things – a way you explore life and places where you are. It’s about explanation, discovery and curiosity. It’s about how you relate to the environment around you. I talk about what I call archaeogeography – psychogeography with the invisible as well. When a buried Roman fort was visible, they used the same topography and visual markers as we might see still in that place today. That’s a really powerful thing.

I’m half Irish: I’ve got an English dad and an Irish mother. I was born in Surrey and I grew up there for the first nine years of my life, before my dad moved back to Yorkshire, because he was a Yorkshireman. To put that into a historical context, how do you survive in that world, where a, you’re the oppressor and b, you’re the oppressed? We spent months of our holidays in Ireland. I support the Irish rugby team and the English cricket team. How do you navigate some of those conversations? What is truth? What is fact in the past?

My mother’s absolutely convinced my interest in archaeology came from watching Indiana Jones & the Last Crusade. I loved geography, but not so much physical geography, so when I applied to university I went for geography degrees with a difference. I did geography and archaeology at Manchester in the early 90s.

I had this road to Damascus moment. My specialist geography subjects were around human geography and landforms – how did medieval ownership shape the landscape we have today? You bolt on archaeology to that conversation, and you get this total time narrative about how interaction with the landscape influences who we are today, and vice versa.

To me the great archaeologists are the great communicators. The person who just wowed me at Manchester was the late Dave Coombs. I can remember the time he placed in my hand the gold ring from Flag Fen. He took us up to the top of Mam Tor hillfort, and none us were able to stand up because of the wind: and then you just ask the question, what the hell were people living up here for?

I did an mPhil at Cambridge University, in archaeological heritage management at museums. Colin Renfrew came in and taught us about how archaeological thought and philosophy changed since the late 19th century and the creation of the three-age system – the impact of radiocarbon dating, how that then created processualism, and how postprocessualism asked, where’s the human being in this conversation? Brilliant!

What he was doing was showing that people were asking questions in different ways, defined by who they were and their own experience. And that to me is when archaeology becomes so powerful. It is us asking our questions, in our time.

I then went out into the world to try and get a job, and nobody wanted to touch me with a barge pole! My head was full of theory and philosophy. I hadn’t dug, because I was really interested in those bigger narratives of who we are, and how archaeology relates to the place we live in. It’s a very Celtic approach: I don’t believe places die, I believe they carry on living. Anglo-Saxons tend to say, it’s a monument now, it’s dead. But actually, no, we still attach value to it.

I ended up at the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere, talking about how the landscape influenced Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s poetry. From there I joined the

cba’s 20th Century Fortifications in the

ukproject, and later the Defence of Britain project. But I needed excavation experience, so when I was 30 I quit the cba and dug with the Cambridge Archaeological Unit for two years. I worked with Mark Knight at Bradley Fen, next to where he eventually found Must Farm. I have never come across somebody who can visualise, from the material in front of him on the ground, archaeology and stories like he can.

Rather than preserving the past, heritage is actually about the creation and understanding of cultural value: heritage and archaeology is a creative industry. I don’t believe archaeology is a “finite and non-renewable resource”. I’ve never known the number of sites in this country to go down – we keep finding more and more!

I have a real job to do. The cba needs to strengthen its core base to make it more resilient. We need to empower the membership, and we need to get people to want to come to us because we have a really great message.

I’m deeply worried there’s too much archaeology done in this country for archaeologists only. If instead we all help shape the questions, we get better answers. I want the cba to be this place where we debate how we can capture the idea that everyone can be part of the discussion, about a site, a place, an object. I just can’t wait to find out all these stories. The world’s full of them, and that’s really really exciting.

Interview Mike Pitts