Professor Barry Cunliffe

Professor Barry Cunliffe0:00

This download is the only extract the BBC has of this edition of Desert Island Discs. The presenter was Roy Plumley.

Professor Barry Cunliffe0:08

What part of the country do you come from? I come from Portsmouth.

Professor Barry Cunliffe0:11

And uh I've lived and worked in that area practically all my life.

Presenter0:14

To what influence do you owe the the fascination with the past that led you to be an archaeologist?

Professor Barry Cunliffe0:20

I remember very well. Um

Professor Barry Cunliffe0:21

I I spent many happy summers on an aunt's farm in Somerset. I remember one day being told that there was a Roman villa in in the field nearest the farm, and and going out there in great excitement, and kicking over the mole hills, and picking up bits of Roman floor and tile and pottery. Gradually it built up from that until

Presenter0:38

Mm-hmm.

Professor Barry Cunliffe0:41

At my school there was an opportunity to go on an excavation.

Presenter0:45

Yes. You read archaeology and anthropology at Cambridge.

Presenter0:49

and collected a first-class honours degree, and you've stayed up in the university to read for a doctorate.

Professor Barry Cunliffe0:53

Yes, I began to um read for a doctorate there. I was studying Iron Age communities in Britain, people who lived in southern Britain before the Romans came.

Presenter0:53

Yes, I

Presenter1:02

Yes. You had already started directing excavations at a site that was to keep you very fully occupied for about

Professor Barry Cunliffe1:08

Uh

Presenter1:08

Eight or nine years.

Professor Barry Cunliffe1:09

Uh

Presenter1:10

Uh

Professor Barry Cunliffe1:10

Oh yes, this th this was Fishbourne. Yes indeed. Um uh fishborne was uh was quite remarkable.

Professor Barry Cunliffe1:16

not the least in its discovery, because I I think it tells the story of of much modern archaeology.

Professor Barry Cunliffe1:22

A man was driving a JCB, an excavator, and laying a water main, and his machine dug through a heap of Roman tiles.

Professor Barry Cunliffe1:33

He was interested in archaeology. I think he'd seen one or two television programmes about archaeology and he knew he'd discovered something interesting, so he reported it to the locals, local archaeologists. They went out one night and saw that he had in fact cut through the floors of a Roman building, Roman mosaic pavements, jutting into the edge of his trench. And this was this was really a remarkable discovery.

Professor Barry Cunliffe1:55

We were invited to look at it the next year and began excavating. It was 1961 now and excavated there for nine years. And what did you find?

Professor Barry Cunliffe2:08

Well, uh the site had been occupied for

Professor Barry Cunliffe2:12

two hundred and fifty years or so during the Roman period.

Professor Barry Cunliffe2:16

But um the most dramatic discovery was undoubtedly the Great Palace, which was put up there in about the seventies and eighties. A huge building, about fifteen acres or so.

Professor Barry Cunliffe2:25

The site was occupied from soon after the conquest, the Roman conquest, this was in forty-three, but the palace was put up, we think, about seventy-five to eighty, but very, very early for a huge Roman building this size.

Presenter2:40

Yes. How can you pinpoint the number of years it was occupied?

Professor Barry Cunliffe2:44

So accurately.

Professor Barry Cunliffe2:45

Well, we've got coins stratified in the building remains. We've found.

Professor Barry Cunliffe2:52

I don't know, thirty or forty coins underneath the floors of the building.

Professor Barry Cunliffe2:55

and there was no coin after the year 74.

Professor Barry Cunliffe2:59

But then in what we call the occupation layers that go with the building there were coins of the late seventies and eighties. And this gives us our date of somewhere in the mid seventies for the building.

Professor Barry Cunliffe3:11

Then it was burnt down, not until about the two eighties,

Professor Barry Cunliffe3:16

We know about this because in one of the rooms that was burnt there was a shelf of pottery.

Professor Barry Cunliffe3:21

And when the room burnt down, the shelf collapsed and the pots fell on the floor and smashed and were were burnt by the falling rafters. And those pots are very closely datable to just about this period, two seventies and two eighties. And Fishbourne is now

Professor Barry Cunliffe3:35

Laid out for anyone to visit. Yes, this I think is is probably where its main fame lies. Um we could have excavated it and filled it in again, or someone could have built a housing estate on it as they were going to do.

Professor Barry Cunliffe3:48

But um because of a series of coincidences we were able to um expose the main part of the site, the whole north wing of this palace, build a superb museum there with the help of a national newspaper, and people now flock there in their thousands. It's marvellous to go round the site on on a summer day and see the schoolchildren wandering round with their questionnaires, trying to fill them in. The site is being used by people, which is the main thing.

Presenter4:13

While you were excavating at Fishbourne, you had taken up an academic post, and this gave you the job as Director of Excavations at Bath.

Professor Barry Cunliffe4:20

Well, the two weren't directly linked, but um I started teaching in Bristol, in in the university there, and I was asked at more or less the same time to look after the excavations in Bath.

Presenter4:29

Yeah.

Professor Barry Cunliffe4:30

What are the frustrations of working in an urban built-up area? Well, this was very different to Fishbourne, of course, because to start with there were practically no open spaces in the town at all. And our policy was to excavate any site that was going to be developed as a modern building. But this meant that if a building stood, it was knocked down. And there was just a a period of days really before the new building started. So we had very limited time indeed. We set up the organization, got some money, but this coincided really with

Professor Barry Cunliffe5:02

a period when there was a freeze on building.

Professor Barry Cunliffe5:05

So we had an organization and money, but very little rescue excavation to do, so we turned our attention to the great complex.

Professor Barry Cunliffe5:12

of public buildings right in the centre of the town, baths which everyone knows about.

Professor Barry Cunliffe5:17

Uh and the temple. There's a huge temple attached to the baths, which lies now largely beneath the pump room, and we started excavating that.

Presenter5:25

Yes. Now archaeologists must have a very wide range of knowledge. Obviously the technique of excavation but things history, pottery, gems, and above all I should think building construction because if you're diving under the cellars and basements of existing buildings in Bath you've got to know which walls you can knock down and which ones you mustn't.

Presenter5:45

Yeah.

Professor Barry Cunliffe5:45

Yes, well there were many things that I did then which in my wisdom, such as diskowing more about building construction, I certainly would not have done now. It's frightening some of the things, some of the chances which we have to take. But the wide range of knowledge, yes, I think everything is summed up by a phrase of Sir Mortimer Wheeler's, a famous phrase, that all excavating is destruction. What he means is that an archaeologist who moves a shovelful of soil is doing something unique. No one can ever move that shovel full of soil again. So an archaeologist has constantly got to be aware of what evidence he is destroying by excavating and has got to record it, every single fragment of evidence.

Presenter6:32

Now you are professor of archaeology at Southampton, the University of Southampton and shortly you ought to move up to Oxford.

Presenter6:38

And you've been recently excavating just half a dozen miles from your native Portsmouth.

Professor Barry Cunliffe6:43

Yes, yes. I I've been excavating just finished, in fact, at at Porchester Castle.

Professor Barry Cunliffe6:48

Um Borchester is a wonderfully evocative place. It sits at the head of Portsmouth Harbour. The sea laps up around it.

Professor Barry Cunliffe6:57

And it used always to be the the Sunday afternoon treat for me from Portsmouth. It was an easy bus ride from Portsmouth to get to. We started excavating there at the same time as Fishbourne, 1961.

Presenter7:03

Yeah.

Presenter7:06

There's also an Iron Age Hill Fort in in Hampshire that's taking up a lot of your attention.

Professor Barry Cunliffe7:11

Yes, we're just we're gradually building up our our um efforts on this. This is the place called Danebury, which a marvellous hilltop uh capped with trees at the moment, towards the centre of Hampshire. And uh I think it was very much um a town in the Iron Age. We know practically nothing about these sites, that's why it's so exciting to us at the moment.

Presenter7:33

Yeah.

Presenter7:34

Now excavation of a site is a highly skilled operation. It has to be carefully supervised. It's hard work. It needs a lot of people. Where do you get the people?

Professor Barry Cunliffe7:41

people from? Well there is in Britain a a marvellous institution called the Council for British Archaeology and it produces a calendar of excavations throughout the summer months. Um I advertise my excavations there. I say that I'm digging on such and such a site for so long I need thirty, fifty volunteers.

Professor Barry Cunliffe8:00

And give them an address to write to. And anyone who is interested writes in via that organization. Yes. And you keep them and feed them? Yes, we usually organize a camp and provide food and um the more experienced ones get

Professor Barry Cunliffe8:14

pocket money, there's no real money in it, but out of pocket expenses.

Presenter8:17

Do you think there are many occasions on which building contractors deliberately conceal evidence so that their profitable operations aren't interfered with by archaeologists?

Professor Barry Cunliffe8:26

Well, there's no doubt about this at all. I know a story which was told to me by a navvy in a town in which I have been working recently, and he said that they discovered a Roman mosaic pavement. The man in charge said pour concrete over it fast to stop the archaeologists coming in. And I think this really is a reflection of the bad public relations job that archaeologists have done, because building contractors, when they hear of archaeologists, think this means delay, this costs money. It doesn't.

Presenter8:55

It doesn't

Professor Barry Cunliffe8:56

What we've got to do is to build up cooperation with building contractors.

Professor Barry Cunliffe9:02

So that our work doesn't cost them money. And I think there are signs that this is being done at last.

Presenter9:07

There's a great popularization of archaeology now due in part to television films and so forth. Is this altogether a good thing, or does it lead to endless irreparable damage being done by idiots with metal detectors and that sort of thing?

Professor Barry Cunliffe9:20

Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

Presenter9:21

Uh I I

Professor Barry Cunliffe9:22

I think on the whole the popularization is an extremely good thing because it educates people into our needs. There are the lunatic fringe of collectors who are going around with these wicked metal detectors and looting archaeological sites. But gradually we're going to put a stop to that. There is a fairly tough law on it. Archaeologists are up to all sorts of things now, chopping up bits of aluminium and spreading them over sites. It makes these metal detectors bleep unmercifully.

Presenter9:50

Bravo was splendid.

Presenter9:54

What's the most exciting single object you've ever been concerned with finding yourself?

Professor Barry Cunliffe9:59

Yeah.

Presenter9:59

This uh

Presenter10:00

Yeah.

Professor Barry Cunliffe10:00

Very, very difficult question.

Professor Barry Cunliffe10:03

A real feeling of excitement I think I got.

Professor Barry Cunliffe10:07

When excavating in Bath,

Professor Barry Cunliffe10:09

We were digging a trench.

Professor Barry Cunliffe10:11

In the cellar beneath the pump-room, and it was a rather awkward trench, artificial lights.

Professor Barry Cunliffe10:16

surface water pouring in and an unpleasant sewer running across the top of it and dripping sewer at that and the the young lady who was excavating the trench um didn't cut it quite as squarely and neatly as we wanted and and she had

Professor Barry Cunliffe10:32

Reservations about it, and went back and cut the edge of the trench beautifully, squarely. As she did so, she found.

Professor Barry Cunliffe10:39

An inscription. It was the base of a statue.

Professor Barry Cunliffe10:43

sitting actually on the floor of the Roman temple. It was inscribed to the goddess Sulis.

Professor Barry Cunliffe10:50

And then with the name of the man, an augura, who'd put up this statue to the gods. It was a wonderful moment, really.

Presenter10:54

Hello?

Presenter10:56

Anything inscribed, of course, i is the jackpot to an archaeologist.

Professor Barry Cunliffe11:00

Well

Presenter11:01

Yeah.

Professor Barry Cunliffe11:01

Yes, yes. I think um the important thing was that this had not been seen for

Professor Barry Cunliffe11:07

or since about 300 or 400 AD. And here was a link with an actual man, a man called Lucius Marcius Memoir, who had come here and put up this stone for the god.

Professor Barry Cunliffe11:19

And it was a real

Presenter11:19

Yes. On a lighter note, what was the origin of of the popular legend that archaeologists are eccentric to?

Professor Barry Cunliffe11:28

Oh, I don't know. I suppose it it harks back to the days when it was the

Professor Barry Cunliffe11:36

It was the eccentric amateur with rather a lot of money and not much to do with his money, a lot of time on his hands, who...

Presenter11:43

Um

Professor Barry Cunliffe11:44

Uh went abroad and did these weird and wonderful things. Wonderful stories like um Sir Flinders Petrie wandering around in pink flannel underwear surveying the pyramids with his long beard. But um things have changed a lot now. I th I often feel sorry for the visitor, you know, who who leans over our fence at an excavation and expects to see these long-haired eccentrics in long khaki shorts. But uh in fact they see normal, healthy-looking young people wandering around.

Presenter12:11

Are you used to rugged living on digs? Uh the discomfort of a desert island wouldn't be really anything new to you, would it?

Professor Barry Cunliffe12:18

Uh

Presenter12:18

Well I

Professor Barry Cunliffe12:19

I have been used to it. Um I remember washing in streams and and various uncomfortable things like that. No, I think um I could cope fairly well with a desert island. Yes, you would live off the land? Oh, yes, yes, and I I would enjoy building huts because as an archaeologist I write a lot about primitive huts and I'm sure it's all wrong. It'd be rather fun to try it out.

Presenter12:35

Sure.

Presenter12:38

As a Portsmouth man, do you know about small boats? Would you try to escape?

Professor Barry Cunliffe12:41

No, no, I certainly wouldn't. Uh I'm scared of the sea. I love the sea, but um no, I'd probably build a raft for the fun of building it, but I never venture out on it.