Archaeology Magazine - July/August 1990 - 70

Peterhouse College.
An urbane, civilized host, Renfrew has an air of dignity and distinction that comes easily to him. As we ate
lunch at the College, several Fellows came up to conduct
business or simply to pass the time of day. It was revealing to watch a consummate diplomat at work. A Mastership like Renfrew's is a demanding job, one that requires the skills to mediate between the University and
the College, and to administer a diverse community of
Fellows and students. The job also demands the intellectual breadth to work closely with talented people from
many academic walks of life. It takes an imaginative
leap to believe that this impeccably dressed, well mannered university don has shoveled dirt under the Aegean
sun and excavated in the northern chill of the Orkney
Islands.
Like many successful archaeologists, Colin Renfrew
came to archaeology at an early age. He discovered the
Etruscans during an Italian vacation at the age of 13, after which he went on digs in Britain at least twice a year.
He learned his excavation skills under Romano-British
archaeologist Sheppard Frere. While such training has
long been a passport to success in British archaeology,
Renfrew came to St. John's College, Cambridge, with
no intention of becoming an archaeologist. But a year of
study in the Natural Sciences convinced him that he
would never enjoy being a research physicist or a captain of industry. Then he met Glyn Daniel, megalithic
expert, bon-vivant, and an archaeologist with a gift for
recruiting talented students to the field. "Colin was my
best student," Daniel told me at a convivial lunch some
months before his death in 1986, "intellectually brilli"
ant, full of curiosity, and, yes, so tactful
Renfrew graduated from Cambridge at a time when
European archaeologists were still strongly under the
influence of Gordon Childe, a great but eccentric prehistorian. Childe had constructed a model of European
prehistory based on the principle of diffusion - holding
that all major innovations, agriculture, metallurgy, and
megaliths originated in the Near East and spread to
Europe. Childe and his contemporaries dealt with the
"nuts and bolts" of archaeology, with minute details of
potsherds, brooches, and other finds in order to establish artifact chronologies from one end of Europe to
another. Young Renfrew found himself looking not so
much at the nuts and bolts but at the broad themes of
European prehistory. He was drawn to the very area
where Childe had started his European research - the
Balkans and the Aegean, the critical bridge between Europe and the Near East. In the Athens Museum, he admired the sureness and sophistication of Early Bronze
Age sculpture from the Cyclades and wondered about
the people who crafted such masterpieces.
Renfrew wrote his doctorad dissertation on the prehistory of the Cycladic Islands of the Aegean. He focused
on Saliagos on the island of Antiparos, the first Neolithic
farming community ever excavated in the Cyclades.
The site was a deliberate choice on his part, for it was
here, he believed, that with carefully designed research
34 Archaeology

he would obtain not only chronological data to evaluate
Childe's vision of European prehistory, but also evidence of early Aegean trade. He worked with John
Evans, a professor of European archaeology at the
University of London. Renfrew smiles with pleasure as
he remembers what he calls "a happy partnership."
Saliagos was a practical lesson in the intricacies of Aegean archaeology and of prehistoric trade. At Saliagos
he recognized the potential of obsidian, the volcanic
glass prized as a raw material for stone tools the length
and breadth of the Mediterranean, as an indicator of
ancient trade patterns. Here Renfrew's training in the
natural sciences came into play, when he and Cambridge petrologist J.R. Cann used trace-element analysis to identify major obsidian sources in the eastern
Mediterranean. The resulting papers that introduced
the concept of "down-the-line" trade, whereby obsidian
was passed from village to village in diminishing
amounts the further one traveled from the source, established Renfrew as a budding scholar of the first rank.
Anyone talking about archaeology with Renfrew realizes at once that here is a scholar who has thought long
and hard about the theoretical underpinnings of his
subject. This interest began during his undergraduate
days, when he argued theory with his contemporaries,
among them the late David Clarke, a theoretical young
Turk of the 1960s. While writing up Saliagos, he was
strongly influenced by R.B. Braithwaite's ScientificExplanation, a then somewhat revolutionary work that espoused a systems theory approach to science. (Systems
theory concerns relationships in the physical and natural worlds, and views human cultures as complex systems interacting with the ecological system). From systems theory it was but a short step to the intricate
ecological relationships that governed prehistoric Aegean
life. In his now classic The Emergenceof Civilization,which
was published in 1972, Renfrew placed the Saliagos
finds, and those from other excavations, in a wider ecological and cultural context. With its sophisticated descriptions of agriculture and trade, of complex island
and mainland environments, the book came like a breath
of fresh air after years of tedious arguments over dusty
artifacts and intricate cross-datings. TheEmergence
of Civilization caused a sensation among Renfrew's colleagues;
the second of his great achievements, it appeared as the
ferment over more scientific approaches to archaeology
was at its height. Some of Renfrew's colleagues say that
he was strongly influenced by the thinking of David
Clarke and other archaeological contemporaries, but he
himself claims that he "discovered" systems approaches
for himself, and was encouraged to find that others were
using the same approach.
Even before TheEmergence
of Civilizationappeared, Renfrew was on an academic fast track. After a Research
Fellowship at St. John's College, Cambridge, he became
Lecturer in Archaeology at Sheffield University in 1965
under Professor Robert Hopper, an ancient historian of
great political skill. Renfrew's seven years at Sheffield
constituted an important formative period, for the young

Archaeology Magazine - July/August 1990

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