An Interview with Professor Robert J. Wallis

Today here at Albion Calling I am privileged to have Robert J. Wallis, Professor of Visual Culture at Richmond, the American International University in London, here with me. Wallis is an archaeologist and over the past two decades he has worked extensively on rock art and the interaction between archaeology and the contemporary Pagan and Neo-Shamanic religious movements. Here, we talk about his research and career, covering such issues as the ‘shamanic’ interpretation of visual imagery, the relationship between mainstream academia and ‘alternative archaeologies’, and the archaeology of falconry. 

[EDW]: An archaeologist by training, you are currently Professor of Visual Culture and Associate Dean of MA Programmes in the School of Communications, Arts and Social Sciences at Richmond University, the American International University in London, having joined the faculty there in 2002. In previous years you have also worked for the University of Southampton, the University of Winchester, and the Open University. Can you tell us a little bit more about your academic trajectory and how you reached the point that you are at today?

[RW]: I didn’t start out with an ambition to be an academic. I was passionate about nature photography and wanted to go to art school but just didn’t cut it. So I had a necessary rethink. Alongside my interest in wildlife, I was reading about ancient art, literature, mythology, religion and archaeology, with a particular interest in the pagan religions of ancient Britain. So I decided to apply for an archaeology degree and was offered a place at Southampton University where I started in 1992. Only in my second year did I really find subjects that interested me – prehistoric art, rock art specifically and indigenous religion, shamanism in particular. Peter Ucko (co-author of Palaeolithic Cave Art, 1967) initially took me on as a dissertation student and suggested I talk to a new lecturer who had just arrived from South Africa, Thomas A. Dowson. Thomas encouraged my interest and pointed me to his work on Southern African rock art and the neuropsychological model he co-authored with David Lewis-Williams for interpreting Upper Palaeolithic cave art, all of which I read with great interest.

I went on to write my undergraduate dissertation under Thomas’ supervision, focussing on megalithic art, specifically the shamanistic interpretation of Irish passage tomb art, and also benefited from the advice of Julian Thomas, one of the few later prehistorians to have examined megalithic art at that time. I then completed the MA Archaeology and Anthropology of Rock Art (1995-1996), the first degree of its kind, and wrote a dissertation on rock art in Namibia where I had conducted fieldwork with a Southampton team in 1995. I examined ethnographic records on the Bushman (San), ranging from the Bleek and Lloyd transcripts to Katz’s Healing Energy (1982), and offered a shamanistic interpretation of the engravings at Twyfelfontein (in central Namibia) based on the landscape context of the art within a semi-arid river valley subject to flash floods. I made a link between the significance of rock art juxtaposed with sources of water informed by shamans’ metaphors for trance such as drowning and submergence. All of this might sound somewhat dated now but despite the vitriolic reaction against shamanism in rock art studies – Paul Bahn was almost libellous in his attack on our MA presentations at the Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG), in British Archaeology magazine (issue 31, Feb 1998) – this approach to certain rock art traditions (e.g. parts of Southern Africa and North America) is accepted by most scholars.

I tell my MA students that my MA was one of the best years of my life and that they should relish the experience of independent learning and research because, unless they have the opportunity to work on a PhD (which increasingly few do given funding cuts to the humanities and social sciences), they will never be so fortunate again – to engage in pure research, at such a formative time in their lives.

I started a PhD with Thomas as his first PhD student, during which time I taught his undergraduate courses ‘Art and Society’, ‘Art of Prehistoric Europe’ and modules on the MA including on ‘Cave Art’, and had a brief stint co-ordinating adult education in archaeology at Southampton’s New College (now part of the University). Teaching ‘mature students’ who’ve been out of education for a while but returned to it with enthusiasm was a real pleasure and I’ve since enjoyed teaching the 4000-level introductory course ‘The Arts Past and Present’ (2003-present) for the Open University because of the enrichment I’ve seen and been a part of.

I completed my doctorate in 1999. Thomas was an excellent supervisor and I would not have succeeded on the BA, MA or PhD without his advice, for which I am truly grateful. He moved to the University of Manchester so I was at the right place at the right time to be employed as a temporary lecturer in archaeology at Southampton, covering the undergraduate and post-graduate teaching, dissertation supervision plus some PhD advising. I also moonlighted at Winchester for the Department of Cultural Studies on their MA in Death, Religion and Culture. Knowing these positions were short-term though, during 2001-2002 I worked hard to find a full-time academic post and applied for over 80 lectureships, fellowships and research positions. I was short-listed for three interviews, one at the University of Sussex for a lecturer in the History of Art, one in archaeology at University College London (UCL), the other at Richmond. I took up the post of Assistant Professor of Visual Culture and Associate Director of the MA in Art History at Richmond in 2002. The MA was set up by Jos Hackforth-Jones, now Director of Sotheby’s Institute of Art. Jos’ vision – forward looking in art history at that time – was an MA in Art History with a distinctive intercultural outlook. This enabled me to teach the archaeology and anthropology of art, including rock art, on an Art History MA – still almost unheard off, sadly. Richmond is a small, independent, private liberal-arts institution, offering an American-style education in Britain. I have been there for 12 years and continue to convene the MA programme in its reconfigured form of ‘Art History and Visual Culture’ and as Associate Dean I also oversee four other MAs. The international student body and small class sizes make teaching there a pleasure and a privilege.

At the Hovgarten Runestone, Sweden

[EDW]: One of your main interests has been the archaeology of rock art, and the relation that such imagery has with religion and spirituality, and in particular with animism and shamanism. You recently contributed to a special volume of Time and Mind: The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness and Culture devoted to rock art. Where do you see the role of rock art research within the discipline of archaeology?

[RW]: Until fairly recently, archaeologists tended to neglect art (including rock art) and religion in favour of such presumed safer topics as artefact analysis, subsistence patterns and social hierarchies, or they examined them in isolation from other social phenomena. We have tended to think about art as an add-on to society, based on modern traits of seeing the artist as an inspired genius living outside social norms and prehistoric religious practices have often been viewed as inaccessible without supporting historical or ethnographic records, even though ‘ritual’ has been a problematic dumping bag. But in indigenous communities (and probably in prehistory) artists and religion are usually active and entangled parts of the social fabric and people’s broader engagements with their world.

Rock art scholars such as Dowson and Lewis-Williams demonstrated that ethnography could inform rock art interpretation and an etic term such as ‘shamanism’ could offer a useful heuristic. But their interpretation of certain Upper Palaeolithic cave art imagery as shamanistic was controversial and scholars fell into two increasingly polarised camps, denying shamanism’s usefulness outside Siberia or seeing shamanism or altered states of consciousness at least, in almost any visual art. We have, thankfully, moved on from a simplistic entoptics=shamanism equation, uncritical application of ‘shamanism’, and sweeping dismissals of these lines of enquiry.

I am concerned, though, by an increasingly essentialist and materialist emphasis on neuroscience and evolutionary biology in certain areas of rock art studies and archaeology more generally. Raymond Tallis calls this neuromania (2012), ‘we are our brains’, expressed in rock art research as neurotheology, the reductive notion of ‘god [i.e. religion] in the brain’. This is part of a ‘material turn’ which has included a backlash against theory, in some cases limiting enquiry to only the scientific examination of artefacts with grand claims for the scope offered by new technologies, as if research can be done in an atheoretical vacuum and that the accumulated data can speak for itself. Data collection is obviously important but should not be an end in itself; the recording of or attempts to date rock art do not in itself reveal meaning.

More interesting research has looked beyond motifs and the rock art panel, to archaeological and landscape contexts, including excavations at rock art sites which have had interesting results. Richard Bradley and Andy Jones’ work have been significant in this respect (e.g. An Animate Landscape, 2011), and I like Andy’s approach to rock art as process rather than product, the sensory aspects of rock art and its locales, and the relationship of rock art to other aspects of material culture – rock art is part of archaeology.

[EDW]: Your first book was an anthology co-edited with Kenneth J. Lymer for the BAR International Series of publications, A Permeability of Boundaries: New Approaches to the Archaeology of Art, Religion and Folklore (British Archaeology Reports, 2001). This contained 15 papers –– contributed by an impressive line-up including Richard Bradley, Miranda Aldhouse Green, Chas S. Clifton, Paul Devereux, and Thomas Dowson –– and had its origins in a conference that you had organised at the University of Southampton in 1999. A big part of the volume’s significance was in bringing together mainstream academic archaeologists with “alternative archaeologists” in constructive dialogue, a theme that has subsequently reappeared throughout your research. How did this conference and publication come about, and did you feel that there was a lot of support for this pioneering endeavour; conversely, were you dogged by opposition from more insular elements of the academy who wanted to keep “alternative” ideas out?

[RW]: I worked on the Permeability conference and subsequent book with two other PhD candidates at Southampton, Kenneth Lymer and Simon Crook. We all felt that our interests in art, religion and folklore were largely ignored by mainstream archaeology – Ken working on shamanism and rock art in Kazakhstan, Simon on fairy folklore and rock art in Britain, myself on neo-shamanistic engagements with archaeology and anthropology. We also recognised that studies on art, religion and folklore, across disciplines, had a great deal to offer one another, particularly in archaeological interpretation. And we felt that these ‘fringe’ areas and thinking on them from outside the academy had an important contribution to make to ‘mainstream’ archaeology. This was around the time that such alternative archaeology journals as The Ley Hunter, Northern Earth and 3rd Stone established themselves as serious forums and published such university-based heavy-weights as Barbara Bender, Thomas Dowson and Julian Thomas.

The conference proposal was supported by the Department of Archaeology in principle, although on the day the lecture hall was mainly filled with delegates from outside the institution and outside the academy – independent scholars, folklorists, earth mystics, Druids, Pagans and artists. Post-processual archaeology claimed to approach all perspectives on the past as valid, if not equally sound, yet this seemed to us like lip service. The conference brought together a wide range of thinkers who were variously examining art, religion or folklore, and in many cases all of these, from inter-disciplinary points of view. We also brought mainstream and alternative communities together who talked and found common ground.

We had a conference debate on ‘alternative archaeology, has it happened?’ with presentations from a panel comprised of David Miles, Chief Archaeologist of English Heritage, Melanie Pomeroy, author of the Avebury World Heritage Site Management Plan (1998), Paul Devereux, an independent earth mysteries scholar, and Tim Sebastion, Chief of the Secular Order of Druids (SODs). The following discussions were genuinely productive. I remember very clearly the moment when David and Tim shook hands, agreeing that further dialogue was needed on public access to Stonehenge at summer solstice. Just a year later, the first solstice managed open access event happened – thanks to the ongoing work of the Stonehenge roundtable meetings rather than an outcome of our conference, but it was clearly the right time for such an event.

There has been a great deal of collaboration between heritage managers and Pagans since then, but in recent years an increasing polarisation to do with the reburial issue. Some Pagans campaigning for respect for and the reburial of prehistoric human remains in Britain challenge the process of excavation and analysis of human remains, two key elements of archaeological practice, even though the resulting information is often used by Pagans in the construction of their Pagan identities. Of course not all Pagans are calling for reburial, but the issue has gained press coverage and contributed to a ‘crisis in British burial archaeology’, the theme of the Papers from the Institute of Archaeology in 2011 (volume 21).

I am currently co-editing a book with Jenny Blain in which archaeologists, heritage managers and Pagans contribute their current thinking on ‘ancestors’ and the human remains debate particularly. But I want this to be more than a space for points of view. The Avebury reburial consultation may have been transparent (it was applauded by the Museums Association in this regard) but the outcome of retention of the remains was prefigured in the discussion. ‘Transparency’ actually counted for little in terms of reaching common ground. Our aim is to bring dialogue back to the table but in a way which leads to practical solutions including policy and practice. So despite finding common ground at the Permeability conference, 15 years later there is still a long way to go, requiring compromise on all sides.

[EDW]: A book of yours that I thoroughly enjoyed reading was Shamans/Neo-Shamans: Ecstasy, Alternative Archaeologies and Contemporary Pagans (Routledge, 2003), in which you look at the historical development of Neo-Shamanism and the manner in which it has made use of indigenous shamanisms. As part of that you championed it as a valid spiritual practice, rather than focusing, for instance, on criticising it as a manifestation of cultural misappropriation (as others have). What led you to research and write this book?

[RW]: Shamans/neo-Shamans was the re-write of my PhD thesis. For the PhD I initially wanted to work on the shamanistic production of rock art in the present, but there was very little to go on (at that time). Thomas suggested that if my interest was in contemporary shamanism, then why not explore neo-shamanistic practices, specifically those westerners engaging with indigenous shamanisms and interpreting archaeological material as ‘shamanistic’. I had been involved with Pagans and neo-shamanistic practices for some years then, so had knowledge, experience and informants to draw upon. The area of ‘Pagan studies’ was also being formed at that time in the study of religion, but very few archaeologists had considered contemporary Paganism or related groups as being of serious interest (the trail blazers were Chris Chippindale [1986], Christine Finn [1997] and Kathy Denning [1999]).

I recognised, though, that neo-shamans, Pagans and others were engaging with the past and the concept of shamanism specifically in ways which had relevance to archaeologists and anthropologists, such as the interpretation of imagery on the Gundestrup cauldron as shamanistic and the appropriation of American Indian sweat lodge and medicine wheel ceremonies by ‘plastic medicine men’ or ‘white shamans’. I also found that archaeologists and anthropologists had themselves influenced those neo-shamans who based their readings of the past on out of date academic literature (e.g. O.G.S. Crawford’s eye goddess [1957]), or that which was on the fringes of academic acceptability (e.g. Marija Gimbutas’ great goddess [1974]). Rather than ignore this as eccentric or unimportant, I thought the current vanguard of archaeologists should be engaging with the topic and how misrepresentations of archaeology and anthropology filtered into popular culture.

In addition to discussing problematic aspects of neo-shamanism, I also recognised that some of their approaches to the past contributed in positive ways to archaeology and anthropology. Academics tend to limit their thinking to theory largely derived from Eurocentric philosophy, rational materialism and empirical method. Neo-shamans might think in these ways too, but they find particular value in more emotional, subjective and spiritual approaches, and gain understandings of the past as a result, some of which I thought had value for archaeologists. And I recognised that while some neo-shamans appropriate indigenous religions, others are more respectful and in some ways ‘give back’, ‘pay extra’ or contribute positively in the exchange. In writing Shamans/neo-Shamans, I hope to have achieved a more balanced appraisal with implications for all the interest groups.

[EDW]: In Shamans/Neo-Shamans, you are quite open about being a practitioner of Neo-Shamanism yourself, and so I’d be interested to learn more about how you came to be involved in this particular spiritual tradition, and how it influences your attitude and approach to past societies. Furthermore, how do you feel that your spiritual beliefs interact with your status as an academic, particularly considering the general mistrust of new religious movements that is present within the mainstream archaeological community?

[RW]: I have identified as a Pagan since I was 16 and would now, if pressed, ‘label’ myself as a Heathen animist. When I came to write the PhD which was later published as Shamans/neo-Shamans, I immediately found myself challenged by the insider-outsider problem. I was a ‘neo-shaman’ of sorts (during this time I co-authored Galdrbok: Practical Heathen Runecraft, Shamanism and Magic 2000, 2005), and an academic, but anthropologists and scholars of religion are not supposed to compromise their objectivity by ‘going native’. As feminists had shown from the 1960s, though, absolute objectivity is impossible to achieve; the ‘objective’ research done largely by white, male Europeans was itself subject to the vagaries of the white, male European. As fallible beings, humans are always subject to biases and prejudice. The key is to recognise one’s potential biases and upfront them.

The post-modern ‘theoretical turn’ and importance of reflexivity in humanities and social sciences’ research impacted on archaeology as post-processualism, and on anthropology as ‘Writing Culture’ (Clifford & Marcus 1986) and ‘experiential’ and ‘auto-ethnographic’ methods (e.g. Young & Goulet 1994). Pagan studies has demonstrated that being an ‘insider’ brings its own value to the study of religion, alongside more established approaches. In the book I attempt to ‘queer’ archaeology (see also my 2000 World Archaeology article) in my examination of neo-shamanism by proposing an ‘autoarchaeology’, which allows me to take my own experiences as valid data, and to critically reflect on this in order to achieve some balance.

What this brought to my research, in the form of Shamans/neo-Shamans and publications since then, I think, is an attempt at an even-handed approach to the material. Unlike others (e.g. Cult Archaeology and Creationism: Understanding Pseudoscientific Beliefs about the Past, 1995), I have not dismissed neo-shamans, Pagans and others outright as dangerous ‘pseudo-archaeology’, nor have I let them get away with it. I point to people such as Gordon ‘the toad’ MacLellan, an environmental educator and storyteller who is changing the way children view their world through such simple things as mask-making and pond-dipping. I also considered the Heathen practice of seidr, which draws closely on literary sources in the Eddas and sagas, and archaeological data, to reconstruct a neo-shamanistic practice relevant today, and with interesting results for scholars of the period (as best demonstrated in Jenny Blain’s book Nine Worlds of Seidr-Magic, 2002).

And yet I held other neo-shamanisms to account. Core-shamanism, invented by former anthropologist Michael Harner, for instance, now has a global reach by claiming to be the bare-bones of shamanism without cultural baggage; but this stripping away of indigenous culture decontextualises shamanism and imposes Euro-American values of individualism, personal growth and inner journeying – even if Harner has made important contributions to the reinvigoration of certain indigenous shamanisms with his method. I think emotional and spiritual engagements with the past have value not only in themselves or only to those claiming them, but also to scholars of past societies. Only fairly recently has an archaeology of the senses (Tarlow 2000; Harris & Sorensen 2010) and sensorial archaeology emerged (see Yannis Hamilakis’ Archaeology and the Senses: Human Experience, Memory and Affect 2014), so I think it is time for an archaeology of, not just about, spirituality (and towards this end see the papers in Archaeology of Spiritualities 2012).

[EDW]: With religious studies scholar Graham Harvey of the Open University you co-authored the Historical Dictionary of Shamanism (Scarecrow Press, 2007). How did this project come about, and what do you see as the potential for greater unity between scholars of religious studies and archaeologists of religion?

[RW]: Graham and I had worked together before (for example, the chapters I wrote for his edited volume Shamanism: A Reader (2002) and co-edited volume Researching Paganisms: Religious Experiences and Academic Methodologies (2004). With our mutual interest in shamanism, in all its variety, it made good sense for us to collaborate on the dictionary. It was fun to write, because each short entry was self-contained so we could work on the thing in bite-size chunks alongside other projects. And because it covered so much ground we learnt a great deal more about the subject. It had an impact too, perhaps more so than we expected, with favourable reviews and a diverse audience ranging from scholars and libraries to neo-shamanistic practitioners – precisely the broad readership we and the publisher had hoped for – leading to a paperback edition, the A-Z of Shamanism in 2010.

The project hopefully shows the positive contributions which collaborations across disciplines can offer. This is nothing new, but there is resistance to trans-disciplinary research, even given the increasing emphasis of funding bodies on collaborations. I suppose scholars of religion are most interested in what is happening now in the synchronic, anthropological sense, while archaeologists are more concerned with the ancient, material past. But there is overlap and dialogue, and I think the dictionary stands as a good example of that. We are currently revising and expanding it for a new 2015 edition.

[EDW]: With the anthropologist Jenny Blain of Sheffield Hallam University you embarked on the Sacred Sites, Contested Rites/Rights project (www.sacredsites.org.uk) in 2001, in which you examined how members of the contemporary Pagan community interpreted and interacted with archaeological monuments in Britain. This project resulted in a publication, Sacred Sites, Contested Rites/Rights: Pagan Engagements with Archaeological Monuments (Sussex Academic Press, 2007), which really is the first –– and so far only –– monograph dealing with the complex relationship between the contemporary Pagan and archaeological sites. How did this project get off the ground, what do you hope that it has achieved, and what is the project’s future?

[RW]: Jenny and I had both been working on neo-shamanisms and Pagan engagements with the past, in different ways, in the late 1990s. I was taking a broader look at neo-shamanistic engagements with archaeology and anthropology. Jenny’s work was more specifically focussed on reconstructionist Paganism in the form of the neo-shamanistic practice of seidr. And while I had considered Pagan engagements with archaeological monuments and their implications for archaeologists, her paper for our Permeability conference and subsequent book focused on Celtic neo-shamanisms in relation to prehistoric archaeology in Scotland. As we each moved into the next phase of research and funding applications, it made sense to collaborate rather than compete.

We founded the Sacred Sites project and worked together for over ten years, during which time we attracted small grants from the ESRC and Nuffield Foundation to conduct fieldwork at various archaeological monuments across Britain frequented by Pagans. We published our findings in a series of publications including journal articles in Folklore (2003), Journal of Material Culture (2004), The Pomegranate (2004, 2009) and Public Archaeology (2006, 2011) – and the book. We aim to have demonstrated that Pagan engagements with archaeology are diverse, with contributions and challenges which affect archaeologists, heritage managers and museum professionals.

Regarding site impact, Pagans are most often allies to archaeologists and heritage managers, volunteering in site clean-up after festival dates, keeping a watchful eye for many years over sites they live near, and protesting against such threats as quarrying (e.g. Stanton Moor, Derbyshire). Where there is antagonism, over the reburial of prehistoric human remains for instance, we have argued for closer dialogue and collaboration in order to reach situationally pragmatic outcomes. There is still work to do in this area, as I’ve noted above, and that is where the project is heading next. Our future research will also look more closely at Pagan materialities with a focus on Pagan visiting to museum collection displays and the implications of this often silent yet significant stakeholder group for museum professionals engaged with diversity and widening participation.

[EDW]: Your most recent book is Antiquaries and Archaists: The Past in the Past, the Past in the Present (Spire, 2009), co-edited with Megan Aldrich, in which you have brought together eight essays looking at how material culture has been interpreted in different ways. How past societies have in turn interpreted the past is something that has gained increasing attention from archaeologists in recent years, and I wondered if this was an area that you wish to look at in further depth?

[RW]: The project began as a pub conversation in The Blowing Stone Inn, a stone’s throw from the Uffington White Horse and Wayland’s Smithy (which I went on to introduce Megan to that day). Megan raised her interest in how artists and antiquaries approached, interpreted and reinterpreted the ancient past and I pointed to examples of ancient communities engaging with earlier archaeology, such as pagan Anglo-Saxon burials in prehistoric monuments. This led to our co-organising a conference on Antiquaries and Archaists at the Society of Antiquaries of London (of which we are both Fellows) in the year of the Society’s tercentenary, and the subsequent book.

There has now been a good deal of research on uses of the past in the past, particularly the re-use of later prehistoric monuments, but this has mainly been focussed on Britain (e.g. Sarah Semple’s paper in the book and her recent book, Perceptions of the Prehistoric in Anglo-Saxon England 2013). Part of our aim with the conference and book was to take a more global approach, but there is clearly more work to be done here. Well-known antiquaries such as [William] Stukeley and [John] Aubrey in Britain, and how they imagined and re-imagined the past, are well-represented but research on the work of various lesser-known antiquaries and those outside Europe is lacking. And there has been interest in how artists engage with the ancient past (e.g. Sam Smiles’ The Image of Antiquity 1994), but again this has tended to focus on modern artists in the West. My specific interest has been in how Pagans in Britain interpret the past, and my chapter in the book considered that with an update on my thinking at that time.

[EDW]: Your most recent publication, just out this month, is “Re-examining prehistoric stone wrist-guards as evidence for falconry equipment in later prehistoric Britain”, in the journal Antiquity (88[340]: 411-424). Please tell us a bit more about it?

[RW]: From a young age I have been interested in birds of prey. My mother took me to the Hawk Conservancy in Hampshire (now not far from where I live) when I was about 8 years old and I felt exhilarated by the experience of having a raptor sit on my fist. Since then, I have wanted to be a falconer. I read Kes, of course, My Side of the Mountain, and The Goshawk. I finally made this dream a reality three years ago. I had read various falconry manuals but hands-on experience is essential. So I completed the excellent LANTRA Beginning Falconry course (which should be mandatory for novice falconers in my view), then trained a female Harris’ Hawk, and we have had three wonderful hunting seasons. There is something very special, difficult to describe, about working closely with a wild creature (birds of prey cannot be domesticated) in a hunting partnership.

I have brought my passions for the archaeology of art and the ‘art’ of falconry together in some of my most recent work. I am interested in how little is known about the earliest evidence for falconry, beyond the much-recounted assumption of Central Asia as its ‘origin’. In fact, archaeological evidence in this region is only just emerging, with the earliest rock art image of a possible falconer dated to around 1000 BCE. But the oldest archaeological evidence is much earlier and from further west, from third millennium BCE Anatolia and Syria, in the form of imagery on pottery sherds, seal impressions and stele.

In An Examination of Prehistoric Stone Bracers from Britain (2011), Woodward and Hunter argue that these polished stone objects from the Late Neolithic and early Bronze Age, often known as archers’ wrist-guards worn to protect against the recoil of the bowstring, were used as falconry equipment. Usually associated with high-status Beaker inhumations, the ‘wrist-guards’ may have been used to carry raptors or more plausibly mounted on falconers’ leather gloves to display wealth and status. This idea begins with the antiquary Lord Londesborough’s dramatic find during his excavation of a cist in a barrow at Driffield, Kelleythorpe, east Yorkshire, which contained a wrist-guard in close association with the remains of a hawk’s head. Other finds of raptors deposited in later prehistoric contexts might supoort a ‘falconry connection’ and this idea seems to have caught on since Woodward and Hunter’s publication. If persuasive it would extend the earliest archaeological evidence for falconry in Britain by some 2000 to 2500 years and compete with the earliest evidence from Anatolia.

My detailed consideration of the wrist-guards and associated objects from a falconer’s perspective, however, demonstrates that the argument is unconvincing. In brief, the stone would blunt the bird’s talons and beak, compromising its effectiveness in hunting; the bird’s talons would in turn damage the carefully manufactured – and clearly intentional – polish of the stone; and the position of the ‘wrist-guard’ anywhere on the glove would present a potential hazard to safe and practical falconry. As to what stone wrist-guards were actually for, well I think they may originate in archer’s functional leather wrist-guards but most were non-functional. The context of Beaker funerary rituals suggests stone wrist-guards were involved in performances of high-status identities (in funeral dramas at least; it is possible the objects were produced purely for the mortuary ceremony), and negotiating concepts of individuality and community—including human-raptor relations—at the Late Neolithic to Early Bronze Age transition, a period of significant social change. Having made the case against stone-wrist guards as falconry equipment I have now returned to the archaeological evidence for falconry in Anatolia and Syria, and extended the project eastwards, in order to more closely scrutinise the earliest evidence for falconry.

Image by Richard Mansfield

[EDW]: Have you got any projects on the horizon that we should look out for?

[RW]: In addition, to those I’ve mentioned above, I’m working on a number of projects which should see publication in the next couple of years. One of these is a series of articles and a book examining art and shamanism ‘from cave painting to the white cube’. I’m interested in how these two concepts have become entangled in western discourse since the Renaissance and Enlightenment, to the point that today such a wide variety of artforms has been labelled as being ‘shamanistic’ and artists as ‘shamans’, from prehistoric rock art to the works shown in contemporary art galleries. In unpacking this history I hope to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of what constitutes shamanistic art, within a broader social, relational setting.

Relating to this, I am in the early stages of working with Max Carocci and Graham Harvey on an exhibition on animism. Finally, you might also be interested in checking out my review of Vikings: Life and Legend (The British Museum 6 March – 22 June 2014) in Time and Mind: The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness and Culture, due out next month, and my forthcoming chapter on ‘Witchcraft and magic in the age of anthropology’ in The Oxford Illustrated History of Witchcraft and Magic, due out later in the year.

[EDW]: A question that I ask everyone in this interview series is where they think that their particular academic field is headed. This being the case, I’d like to ask you where you think both rock art studies and contemporary Pagan studies are headed, and in particular how do you think that they will continue to react with archaeology in the coming years and decades?

[RW]: I’m excited by the way in which some archaeologists have re-engaged with art and religion over the last decade through the broader theorising of materiality across disciplines – how things constitute behaviour and structure people’s relational engagements with their world (e.g. Archaeology after Interpretation, 2013). The rethinking of animism in anthropology and the study of religion has had an important impact on archaeology in the last ten years, just as Melanesian anthropology did in the 1990s in reconsidering prehistoric personhood (e.g. Fowler, 2004) and the roles of ‘objects’ in the ongoing negotiation of identities. Irving Hallowell’s pioneering work with the Ojibwe in the mid-twentieth century has been revisited, and the Ojibwe’s animist approach to a world (to paraphrase Graham Harvey in Animism [2005]), ‘filled with persons, only some of whom are human’. Amazonian animism has also been re-evaluated by Viveiros de Castro as a relational ontology, pointing to a broad Amerindian pattern with localised expressions.

There has since been vigorous debate among anthropologists on indigenous ontologies and the application of relational animism outside the Americas (e.g. Animism in Rainforest and Tundra, 2012), and among archaeologists on the possibilities of this thinking for archaeological enquiry (e.g. the special issue of Cambridge Archaeological Journal 2009). As I set out in the Time and Mind articles (2009, 2013), I think this thinking has potential for the shamanistic interpretation of certain rock art traditions in moving interpretation beyond the individual shaman, their interior altered states and representation of visions in rock art, to rock art imagery as something more or other than representation, and shamans operating with a broader, more-than-human social context.

But we still need to work harder to move out of our own ontological and epistemological comfort zones, and find theoretical and methodological ways to do so. The animals which prehistoric people hunted and domesticated are now often described as ‘persons’, granted with agency in human affairs, but archaeologists still tend to situate this within evolutionary and cognitive schemas in which these ‘persons’ and their ‘agency’ remain vertically below human consciousness, and humans ascendant above ‘nature’. Animals might have been perceived by prehistoric people as having cultures, but it is the humans having the conversation. Amazonian animists recognise by contrast that while all ‘persons’ share culture it is our natures, our bodies, that are different; a case of what Viveiros de Castro terms multinaturalism and uniculturalism, not uninaturalism and multiculturalism. Elsewhere, Aboriginal Australian totemism involves kinship, mutual responsibility and inclusivity across species boundaries (Harvey 2012: 88). If we are all related, all ‘persons’ share ‘culture’ and differ in our natures/bodies, then what is ‘materiality’ is not what it seems and humans are not so special. Daily encounters require relating, with respect, in order to sensually (not ‘objectively’) participate in and negotiate daily life within a more-than-human world. Harvey expresses it as ‘turtles all the way down’, ‘the turtles standing in for consciousness’, and ‘all the way down’, ‘referring to all levels of matter’, and adds ‘hedgehogs all the way around’, referring to those ‘emblematic species… with whom you have interesting encounters, whose interests should interest you’. Archaeologists still have a long way to go in levelling the field and recognising those turtles and hedgehogs.

Pagan studies has matured as an inter-disciplinary field over the last decade, successfully incorporating theory and method from such disciplines as anthropology, religious studies, sociology, psychology and archaeology in the process. We now have a solid if far from complete range of histories and ethnographies of Paganism in the Western world, some of which has set the record straight (I’m thinking of Ronald Hutton here). We also have important theoretical and methodological contributions to the disciplines which Pagan studies draws upon, particularly in terms of insider research and the value of extraordinary experience to expanding our knowledge (e.g. Researching Paganisms, 2004). Criticism (e.g. of Hutton) from outside Pagan studies and within Paganism is an important sign of Pagan studies’ maturity and the health of the debate. Markus Altena Davidsen’s “What is Wrong with Pagan Studies” (in Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, 2012) and your response (in The Pomegranate, 2012) also mark good examples of this.

I agree with you that Davidsen’s approach reduces the scope of research to so-called objective method, which in itself is a problematic aim, and that a mix of approaches, insider and otherwise, is important to the growth of the field. I’m less concerned than you over Pagan studies agreeing on terms, though. Christian theologians, for instance, do not necessarily agree on a definition of Christianity, so I think ongoing discussions and disagreements about the remit of ‘Paganism/paganism’ is OK. I’m more interested in how Pagan studies is adopting and adapting emerging thinking from the disciplines surrounding it, anthropology, archaeology, and so on, particularly the work on new animism and relational ontologies, and perhaps make innovative contributions back as a result. I’m also interested in the impact of Pagan studies on Pagan thinking, for example how Pagans have responded to revisions of the history of paganism (beyond Margaret Murray) and taken up the notion of animism. And I’m especially interested in how academic thinking on ancient paganisms informs Pagans’ ongoing (re)negotiations of their understandings of the past and their own identities. I think there are really interesting studies to be done on how Pagans outside of Europe perceive and engage with British prehistory and religion (which has currency among many international Pagans), how they engage with prehistoric cultures ‘at home’ (e.g. megaliths in eastern Europe), and the role of social media in all of this as an increasingly important part of Pagans’ global-reaching identities (e.g. building on Douglas Cowan’s Cyberhenge 2004, from an archaeological point of view). And returning to an ‘alternative archaeology’, in contrast to some other thinkers (e.g. Schadla-Hall 2004; Holtorf 2005; Fagan & Feder 2006; Cusack 2012), my take on this is that a genuine alternative archaeology is not only about recognising and examining unorthodox archaeologies, but about developing ways of negotiating respect, understanding and informed decision-making among the interest groups – archaeologists and Pagans included – regarding how archaeological material is treated.

[EDW]: Dr Wallis, thank you so much for sharing your story and thoughts with me and my readers today. I wish you all the best with your future endeavours!

Open post to U.S. Pagans: Contribute to Sociology - fill in the Pagan Census Revisited II

Back in the 1990s, the American sociologist of religion Helen A. Berger conducted a project which she termed the Pagan Census in a successful attempt to gain a better understanding of the contemporary Pagan community’s demography. (For those interested, her findings were published in 2003 as Voices from the Pagan Census: A National Survey of Witches and Neo-Pagans in the United States).

Then, from 2009-2010, Berger teamed up with the well-known scholar of new religions James R. Lewis to perform the Pagan Census Revisited, in the hope of observing changes in the intervening decade. Now, Berger and Lewis have created what they term the Pagan Census Revisited II, a series of 31 questions for practicing Pagans in the U.S. They would be grateful if those eligible would fill out the confidential questionnaire online at: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/PCR-II.

Senate House's "Gef the Talking Mongoose" Symposium

Yesterday saw central London’s Senate House Library host a fascinating event titled “If you knew what I know, you’d know a hell of a lot!: A Symposium on Gef the Talking Mongoose.” This pioneering and unique event was organised by Senate House’s research librarian Richard Espley and Christopher Josiffe, the latter of whom has spent much time investigating the Gef case and has published on it in Fortean Times. The remarkable tale of Gef revolved around the claims of the Irving family, who lived in an isolated farmhouse on the Isle of Man during the 1930s. They maintained that their house was haunted by a mongoose who had the ability to speak English; he reportedly informed the family that his name was Gef and that he came from New Delhi. The press jumped on the story and soon reporters were flooding to the island to catch a glimpse of the elusive creature. Following in their wake were parapsychologists and psychic investigators, among them famous names like Harry Price and Hereward Carrington. None found any proof that Gef existed, but the story has lived on and was one that I lapped up when I discovered it as a child.

Josiffe kicked off the event with a well-illustrated introductory presentation on the so-called Dalby Spook. “Panel 1” then opened with Robin Klarzynski’s discussion of the American Beat writer W.S. Burroughs who, perhaps surprisingly, took an interest in Gef and familiar spirits more widely. As part of this, Klarzynski described his analysis of Gef’s comments using Burroughs’ cut-up technique; an artistically interesting approach. Alan Murdie of the Society for Psychical Research followed with a presentation situating Gef within the context of broader British poltergeist activity. In particular, he highlighted the role of both animals and sexuality in poltergeist cases, ultimately proposing that it was incest within the Irving family that generated the emotional turmoil from which Gef emerged. The next paper was by Mark Bell and read in absentia by Espley; it delved into the parallels between the Gef haunting and the 19th century case of the Bell Witch in Tennessee.

 After time for questions and a break for tea and cake, it was on to Panel 2, opened by Espley’s own paper. Here he looked at Gef’s relation to literacy and reading, using Mr. Irving’s transcripts of what Gef allegedly said and did as a basis. Craig Wallace, a PhD student at Queen’s University Belfast, then argued for the influence of the Gef case on two episodes of Nigel Kneale’s 1976 BBC television series Beasts. After another break, we were treated to a screening of Vanished! (1990), an arts film that dramatised the events in question. The film makers, Brian Catling and Tony Grisoni, adopted an interesting ‘talking heads’ perspective, with actors portraying each of the three Irvings as they discussed their personal experiences with Gef. Definitely worth a watch for anyone interested in the whole peculiar affair.
Overall, a very enjoyable symposium and hopefully a sign of more research and similar events to come.

An Interview with Dr. Jacqueline Simpson

Today here at Albion Calling, I am greatly honoured to have a scholar widely regarded as one of Britain's foremost folklorists as my interviewee, Dr. Jacqueline Simpson, currently Visiting Professor at the University of Chichester’s Sussex Centre for Folklore, Fairy Tales and Fantasy. A specialist in both the folklore of Iceland and her native England, Simpson has been active in the field since the 1950s, having published over fifteen books and many other papers in peer-reviewed journals over that period. She currently serves as editor of FLS News, the newsletter of The Folklore Society and has previously been both president of the Society and editor of its journal, Folklore. We talk about the many things that she has accomplished over the years, and discuss everything from the witch-cult theory of Margaret Murray to Simpson’s experiences with the eminent medievalist Hilda Ellis Davidson, and from the folklore of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels to the perils and pitfalls currently facing folkloristics.

[EDW] Having been schooled at Sion Convent in Worthing, West Sussex, you went on to study English Literature and Medieval Icelandic at Bedford College, University of London. For many years you operated as an independent scholar, but returned to established academia in 2010, when you were appointed to the position of Visiting Professor at the Sussex Centre for Folklore, Fairy Tales and Fantasy at the University of Chichester in West Sussex. Can you tell us a bit more about this academic trajectory that you have taken? Were you driven to become an academic and a scholar from an early age?

[JS] There was a fairly ‘academic’ tradition in the Simpson family, where several generations of my forebears were vicars, doctors or schoolmasters, though none of them became dons. In my Belgian mother’s family there were barristers, and also (and more importantly for me) a deep interest in literature, classical music and art. At school I was good at my studies, and was particularly fond of English literature; it was simply taken for granted that I would try to get into university, and there was no need for me to feel ‘driven’ towards it. I did not consciously plan to become a scholar – I just wanted to go on reading and learning for as long as possible.

 I say ‘try’ to get in, because in those days conditions for admittance were tough. There were far fewer universities then than now, and they accepted students not on school-leaving exams but on the basis of their own stringent entrance examinations, often with interviews too. I have seen it stated that only 5% of the population went to university then. It was particularly difficult for women, as almost all colleges at Oxford and Cambridge were for men only. On the other hand, money was no problem for us of the post-war generation; thanks to Labour Government policies, if you did get accepted, a Local Authority grant paid the fees.

And so I had three happy and hard-working years studying for a BA in London, and then two more years doing a thesis for an MA on a little-known Icelandic saga (the doctorate came much later, by the ‘body of published work’ route). My present status as Visiting Professor at Chichester came as a most unexpected and very gratifying surprise.

After the MA I could have applied for a university post, but decided not to, because of my mother’s frail health. So I settled in Worthing as a part-time teacher at my old school, and wrote a couple of academic articles based on parts of my MA thesis. Then came a stroke of luck: both the tutors who had supervised my MA research (Professors Peter Foote and Norman Garmonsway) were approached by publishers with requests to write books for a popular readership, which they were too busy to do, and both said, ‘No thanks, but I do know a young woman who might be interested.’ I most certainly was; hence The Northmen Talk and Everyday Life in the Viking Age. From then on I went on to combine teaching with research and writing, while living at home to look after my mother.

[EDW]: For most of your career, you have been closely affiliated with Britain's foremost organisation for folkloristics, the Folklore Society, at various times serving as its Secretary, President (1993–96), and Editor of its peer-reviewed journal, Folklore (1979–93). You remain a regular at the Society’s London lectures and conferences, sit on the group’s committee, and serve as editor for FLS News, while in 2008 the Society awarded you the Coote Lake Research Medal for your work. How did you get involved in this organisation, and what do you see as its importance and its achievements?

[JS]: My first contact with the Folklore Society was a by-product of my interest in Nordic mythology. I had become interested in the motif of severed heads that speak, and had read somewhere that there were instances of this in British folktales. I wrote to Dr Katharine Briggs asking for references, and she answered very fully and kindly, and advised me to join the FLS for the sake of its library. This was in 1962 or ’63. I soon realised that the study of folklore is a fascinating and important branch of cultural history in its own right, not a mere postscript to long-gone paganism.

I was elected on to the Society’s Council (now called Committee), and eventually, as you say, I served in several capacities. It has been a most valuable and enjoyable experience, and I have made many friends there. 

To understand the importance of the Folklore Society one must realise that in English universities (unlike Ireland, Scotland and most European countries) folklore has not been accepted as an academic subject in its own right, with an entire department to itself. Most universities here, at most periods, have offered no folklore courses whatever; those that did (Leeds at one time, Sheffield at another) did so under the aegis of some more conventional department, and unfortunately were forced by financial pressures eventually to drop the courses. Currently, there is the new and vigorous Sussex Centre for Folklore, Fairy Tales and Fantasy at the University of Chichester – may it live long and prosper!

The Folklore Society therefore played a vital role as a place where isolated folklorists, and scholars for whom folklore was a sideline to their official subjects, could meet, hear lectures, produce a journal, and – most importantly – use the extensive library which the society built up. Our Late Victorian founders were ambitious in their ideas for collecting and publishing material. Sadly, the First World War disrupted their plans, and throughout the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s the Society concentrated its efforts on its journal and its library.

From the 1960s onwards, the Folklore Society steadily raised the academic standard of its journal and other publications, and gained increasing international recognition. Many of its members have written substantial books on one or other aspect of British folk tradition – children’s games and beliefs, witchcraft, fairy lore, plant lore, local legends, seasonal customs, folksong, superstitions, etc – often drawing on the resources of its library and journal. Even in this age of the internet, it is still important to have access to material where accuracy and evidence remain paramount.

[EDW] I’ve asked many of those in this interview series where their fascination with the subjects that they study actually stem from, and I’d like to extend that question to you; did you have a love of folk and fairy tales in childhood, or is this an interest that developed later in life?

[JS] My mother used to say it was her fault I turned to folklore, since she gave me Grimm’s fairy tales, stories of King Arthur, and a book on Greek myths as a child. Certainly I liked them, but the real fascination developed much later, through Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and medieval poetry.

[EDW] Born in Worthing, Sussex, you’ve clearly taken a great interest in the folklore of your home county, having published The Folklore of Sussex (1973, 2002, 2009) and articles on Sussex sites like Chanctonbury Ring and the Long Man of Wilmington. I can certainly understand why you would be interested in this area; it’s a beautiful place. For you, as a native, what is it that is so fascinating about the folklore of Sussex? How does it stand out from the folklore of neighbouring counties like London, Kent, or Surrey?

[JS] I remember very precisely how and when my interest turned to Sussex tales. It was in the summer of 1968. I had been working on Icelandic legends, but one day I was chatting with some workmen who were repainting my kitchen, and one of them jokingly mentioned the Devil at Chanctonbury Ring. This brought back my own childhood memories, and I thought to myself, ‘Hey, it’s not just in Iceland that people tell stories about the landscape, we do it here too! Maybe there are more… Enough for an article, perhaps?’ I knew that Worthing Public Library has a large Local History Reference section, so basic research should be fairly simple. Sure enough, I found many references to local customs, tales and superstitions scattered through back issues of the Sussex County Magazine from the 1930s and 40s, in little books on the history of some village, and in published memoirs. Most were brief, but by putting them together, there was soon not only enough for an article, but the makings of a book.

At first the fascination came largely from awareness that this is my county, so these are my stories, but very soon I realised that the same story-patterns can crop up in pretty well any part of Britain, provided the landscape is appropriate – obviously you won’t find tales about giants hurling rocks at one another if there are no rocks lying around. This repetition itself fascinates me too; so many legends that at first seem ‘local’ are in fact ‘migratory’, and not merely within Britain but often in Europe too. Details may vary to fit local topography and local history, but the core of the tale remains recognisable.

I think it dangerous to claim that the folklore of one county ‘stands out’ from others. So much will depend on the accident of whether there have or have not been people to actively collect and record the traditions of that particular area. Nor do I think the county is a really significant unit when one is assessing variation. Sometimes one can spot small local clusters where a story, song or custom seems to have spread from one village to another not far off, presumably through imitative rivalry. And sometimes there are large-scale regional differences, due to differences in social and economic history, e.g. in the growth of cities and industrialisation.

[EDW] Perhaps the strongest single research theme in your career has been the folklore of the Nordic world, something stemming from your undergraduate studies in Medieval Icelandic. Aside from various peer-reviewed papers on the subject, you have published The Northmen Talk: A Choice of Tales from Iceland (1965), Everyday Life in the Viking World (1967), Icelandic Folktales and Legends (1972, 2004), Legends of Icelandic Magicians (1975), The Viking World (1980), and Scandinavian Folktales (1988), in addition to adding introductions and notes to published translations of the Old Icelandic Gudmundar Saga (1955) and Heimskringla (1964). What is it that attracts you to the folk tales of the Northern nations, and could you tell us more about your research into the folk beliefs and tales of the region?

[JS] My interest in Northern literature and lore began with a book I happened to see in my school library, Word Hoard by Margaret Williams. It was an introduction to Anglo-Saxon culture, with translations of various poems, including ‘The Wanderer’ and parts of ‘Beowulf’, and also some information about pagan myths. Then in 1948 the BBC broadcast a two-part radio dramatisation of Njals Saga. I was deeply impressed by the dark, doomed courage seen in the poetry, in the saga heroes, and in some of the myths.

[EDW] As someone who is primarily an Anglo-Saxonist by university training, I am interested by your work with the eminent historian Hilda Ellis Davidson, whom you worked alongside in the Folklore Society and who authored a chapter on archaeology that was included alongside an edition of Old English poem Beowulf that you co-translated with George Garmonsway in 1968. How did you come to know Davidsen, and what was it like working alongside her?

[JS] In the summer of 1950, towards the end of my first year at Bedford College, Hilda Davidson came as a visiting lecturer to give a single talk on Anglo-Saxon swords. She was at that time on the staff of Birkbeck College, another branch of London University; previously, under her maiden name of Hilda Ellis, she had published her first book, The Road to Hel, a study of early Nordic beliefs about death and the afterlife, which I had read with great excitement. Of course as a mere student I did not actually meet her on this occasion, but her lecture had a decisive impact on my life

In the London Honours English course, students had to pick an ‘ancillary’ subject to study in their latter two years, something only marginally related to the main syllabus. The ancillaries on offer at Bedford were Modern Irish Drama, the History of Literary Criticism, and Medieval Icelandic (Old Norse). I passionately wanted to do the latter, of course. But a fellow student, one of those candid friends one should avoid like the plague, told me I’d become such a bore on the topic of Old English poetry that if I added sagas to my repertoire I’d be unliveable with, and Icelandic was a useless subject anyway. This had shaken me – was I being selfish? Should I give up my own wishes, and do Irish Drama? Then I listened to Dr Davidson on how pattern-welding was done, and what magic there was in swords, and I came out of her lecture almost in tears at the thought of abandoning the wonders of the North… and, encouraged by an older and more sensitive friend, I signed up for the Old Norse course.

Years later, when I joined the Folklore Society, I was delighted to find that Hilda was on the Council, and we got to know each other well. She had an amazing range of knowledge and interests, and wonderful enthusiasm, both in lectures and in conversation. Time and again she would return from visiting some archaeological site or some museum exhibition, with glad cries of ‘It’s so, so exciting!’

It was Professor Garmonsway’s idea that she should contribute a chapter to the Beowulf book, since archaeology was relevant to the topic. She sent her section direct to him, so I cannot claim to have actually worked with her. Of course we often talked of Anglo-Saxon and Norse topics, and went to the same meetings and conferences.

One which I remember well was the second Celtic-Nordic-Baltic Folklore Symposium in Galway in 1991; we sat together, simmering with quiet indignation whenever speakers claimed that a particular genre (e.g. legends of buried treasures) was distinctively Celtic-Nordic, when we knew it was common in England too. This the first time I really grasped how little was known outside Britain – or even in Britain itself – about our rich repertoire of local legend. When we got back to England we grumbled about this to various friends in the FLS, including Jennifer Westwood. I suspect that the origins of Lore of the Land may go back to these grumbles.

[EDW] Throughout the latter part of the 1970s and 1980s you also published on a wide array of folkloric topics: The Folklore of the Welsh Border (1976), British Dragons (1980), The Penguin Dictionary of Historical Slang (1982; with Eric Partridge), and European Mythology (1989). How did you manage to carry out so many diverse strands of research, and what brought about your interest in these various subjects?

[JS] The first two you mention were natural developments from The Folklore of Sussex. It had sold unusually well for such a topic, so the publishers (Batsford) commissioned a series of similar regional books, and assigned the English counties nearest to the Welsh border to me. I was dubious, for it is a large area to cover in a book of the size they had allotted, and much of it had already been covered by previous folklorists. I would have preferred to tackle some less well known area, but for commercial reasons the publishers stuck to their choice. I think of Folklore of the Welsh Border as my ‘patchwork quilt book’ – a mass of small items stitched together from various sources.

British Dragons, on the other hand, arose entirely from my personal fascination with the topic, which started when I found out that my own Sussex dragon, the Knucker of Lyminster, was not alone of his species, for there were other local dragons and dragon-slayers scattered up and down Britain, each more dramatic and/or amusing than the last, which nobody had ever studied as a group. I spent many happy hours tracking them down through various books of regional and local lore in the FLS library.

The Historical Slang book was another commissioned work, a scissors-and-paste job abridging and selecting from Partridge’s extant two-volume Dictionary of Slang. A boring job, with no actual research involved.

European Mythology was again a publisher’s idea – or rather, my modification of their idea. Hamlyn were running a series of mythology books, and what they thought of as European ‘mythology’ was stories of historical or semi-historical figures regarded as heroes. I said this was very narrow; I would prefer to tackle wider issues in popular belief and culture, e.g. the belief in witchcraft, or in fairies, attitudes to death, and so on. I have always liked writing for ‘general readers’ and giving them what I hope is sensible information on topics which intrigue me, so this was a book I very much enjoyed doing. Once again, information mostly came via the FLS library.

[EDW] Much of my research has looked at the development of the contemporary Pagan religion of Wicca, which was founded largely from the basis of the witch-cult theory advocated by Margaret Murray in the first half of the twentieth century. One of your most widely read papers has been “Margaret Murray: Who Believed Her and Why?”, published in Folklore in 1994; in that paper you built on the work of historian Norman Cohn and highlighted the various problems with Murray’s hypothesis. Why did you feel the need to put together that paper, and what do you think Murray’s influence in folkloristics – and the public perception of folkloristics – has been?

[JS] It began accidentally. The Folklore Society decided to hold a conference on the theme of women folklorists in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and we sat around discussing who’d like to do which. I picked Murray because I’d read her Witch-Cult in Western Europe in my teens, and had found it exciting and convincing. Naturally by the 1980s I had long realised that her theory was historically rubbish, but my memory of her actual arguments was vague, and I assumed that I would be saying something like ‘She was wrong of course, but when one considers that she used X as source and was influenced by Y, it becomes understandable.’ Instead, I discovered that she distorted, or even suppressed, the statements in her sources in order to fit her preconceived theories, and that her attitude to other scholars was arrogantly dismissive. I was astonished, and indignant.

Murray’s influence on the general public had been considerable. It can be seen in many writings from the 1930s onwards, from the pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica to assumptions made about pagan survivals in detective stories, ghost stories and horror films, and it was, as you say, crucial to the formation of Wicca in the 1940s. It was widely assumed among historians that most folklorists endorsed her views – even Ronald Hutton in his early book The Stations of the Sun casually referred to ‘the folkloric or Murrayite view of witchcraft’ – and I felt this mistaken perception might well be one reason why folklore was not seen as a ‘respectable’ academic subject. I felt it was very necessary to put the record straight.

[EDW] In the early years of the twenty-first century, you published two significant overview works on the subject of English folklore; The Dictionary of English Folklore (2000), which you co-authored with Steve Roud, and The Lore of the Land: A Guide to England’s Legends (2005), which you co-authored with Jennifer Westwood. These are both major projects, and I was wondering how they actually came about, and what you see as their successes?

[JS] These were indeed massive projects, and I feel proud and happy to have achieved them. As regards The Dictionary of English Folklore, the initiative again came from the publishers (this seems to be a recurrent theme in my life!). Oxford UP was expanding its range of dictionaries, and approached me to ask if I would do one on folklore. I replied that I would love to, but that the subject is far too big and varied for one person to tackle, and in particular that I was not competent to deal with the musical side. I suggested bringing in Steve Roud, who already had extensive knowledge of folksong, dancing, and the mumming plays. The combination worked extremely well. Steve wrote the entries on these topics, and also most of those on seasonal customs and festivals. I dealt with narratives (local and historical legends, fairytales), magic and supernatural beings (fairies, bogies, witchcraft, ghosts, demons). He did weddings and Christmas; I did Easter and funerals.

The Lore of the Land was originally Jennifer Westwood’s idea; she had convinced Penguin that there was scope for a whole book on English legends, but she also felt that it would be more than she could tackle alone, so she invited me in as her collaborator. This time, the division of labour was not according to topic but by geography. She took counties north of the Thames and up the east half of England, plus Cornwall, on which she had worked some years before; I took the south and the west. We overlapped a bit in the midlands, and shared London; we also shared the ‘green page’ mini-essays on particular subjects. Once again the collaboration worked very smoothly and happily.

With both these books, my collaborators and I had two main aims: to present as full a picture as possible of England’s numerous folk traditions, and to correct out-dated and inaccurate ideas about them which persisted at popular level, e.g. in guide-books, press and TV, though now discarded by scholars. Usually this was a matter of dating; people assumed a custom or belief must be ancient – medieval at the very least, preferably pagan, prehistoric, and concerned with fertility – when the earliest evidence for its existence was from the 17th or 18th century. Jennifer, Steve and I all see folkloristics as a branch of historical studies, where accurate evidence is of prime importance. I am confident that our books are succeeding in both aims.

[EDW] In 1997 you met the famous fantasy author Terry Pratchett at a book signing, and have since become friends, co-authoring a book titled The Folklore of Discworld (2008) together. How did this collaboration come about, and were you a fan of Pratchett’s work beforehand?

[JS] I first discovered the Discworld books when Wyrd Sisters came out (in 1988, I think) and fell in love at once with their cleverness and humour. I read them all avidly, but I was not a ‘fan’ in the sense of going to Discworld Conventions, or collecting Disc-related jewellery, stamps, figurines, craft-work – indeed, I never imagined such things existed. Then in 1997 I learnt that Terry would be coming to Worthing for a book signing, and by good luck I was free that afternoon. Terry’s interest in folklore is obvious from his books, so I decided to give him a copy of my Folktales of Scandinavia as a small thank-you for all the pleasure he had given me. Now, it so happened that he was asking everyone in the queue what rhymes and superstitions they knew about magpies, since he wanted to put magpies into Carpe Jugulum, so he was delighted to find a folklorist standing before him. I told him as much as I could remember there and then, and offered to send him some more once I had consulted books I had at home. That was how it all began.

Not long after, the Folklore Society Committee suggested that I invite him to lecture to us, which he did; it was the most crowded lecture in our history, and a huge success. Meanwhile, he had enlisted me as one of his ‘occasional consultants’, and would ring me up from time to time to check up on some folkloric point he wanted to use. And the phone conversations would then ramble off into a general exchange of news and views, so that although we did not meet again in person, we soon became friends.

Then one day he told me, on the phone, how his fans often asked questions which showed a distressing ignorance of traditional lore, such as, ‘What gave you the idea of having three witches?’ Would it be useful, he asked me, to have a book about the folklore of Discworld, rather like the ones on its science? Certainly, said I, there would be plenty to say. ‘Right,’ said Terry, ‘We will do it together.’ After a moment’s stunned silence, I delightedly agreed.

The collaboration worked very smoothly, by email. I would draft a section and send it to him, and it would return peppered with additional details, jokes, references, footnotes. It is very thoroughly interwoven, so it is just as well that nobody has demanded to know who wrote what. Since 2008 I have been adding further comments on folklore material he has used in more recent books; these appeared in the e-book versions and are now gathered in this year’s second and updated edition of The Folklore of Discworld.

I may say that in 2008 I became a fully fledged fan – I now go to Conventions and Wincanton Gatherings, often in rather crazy costumes, and to book launchings. The whole thing has been a most happy experience.

[EDW] Your most recent book has been Green Men & White Swans: The Folklore of British Pub Names (2010), in which you delved into yet another aspect of Britain's folklore. What was the impetus behind this project, and have you got any further research projects in the pipeline?

[JS] Green Men and White Swans. The suggestion for this book came from the publishers, presumably wanting to build on the success of Lore of the Land, though they said there should be less detail and no scholarly apparatus. It was a fairly easy task, as much of the material is based on what Jennifer and I did for Lore, though presented from a different angle.

I probably will not undertake another book-length project, because I do now find that going up to London is tiring, and working in libraries most frustrating – they are hot, the books are heavy, the shelves either too high or too low for me to read their titles, and in most places (including, alas, the Folklore Society) you have to order the book you need in advance, which means you can never make accidental discoveries or pursue a clue there and then. So I will probably limit myself to small projects which I can cope with in my own home.

[EDW] Given that you have decades of expertise in the subject, I wondered what you felt the current state of folkloristics was like in Britain, and on the wider international stage? Furthermore, what problems do you think that it will face with the current cut-backs in the university sector, and what – in your opinion – will the discipline look like in future decades?

[JS] At present the study of folklore is in remarkably good shape in Britain. Over the past few decades we have seen a succession of well-researched, soundly based surveys of various branches of the subject, regional studies, individual figures (Robin Hood, Spring-heeled Jack, Dick Turpin) and (for the first time) books specifically about London’s folklore, plus Steve Roud’s massive index to folksong and Doc Rowe’s even more massive archives recording the annual performances of our customs over many years. There is no excuse now for wild speculation and woolly theorising – an enormous amount of factual data has been amassed and presented in accessible form, largely thanks to the efforts of members of the Folklore Society and the English Folk Dance and Song Society. 

As for the future, who can tell? At the public level, I am confident that traditional customs and performances will remain popular and will modify themselves whenever necessary to fit in with changing circumstances. The academic future is less clear. Sad experience has shown that when financial cut-backs loom, folklore is one of the first areas to suffer. In some cases, some aspects of folkloristics could find a niche within a faculty of History or English, as it currently has at Chichester. But experience has also shown that individuals have achieved much when researching and writing outside the walls of academia, and I trust this will continue to be possible.

EDW: Jacqueline Simpson, thank you so much for talking to us today - it has been a pleasure, and I am sure that many readers will find your comments to be of great interest. I wish you all the best for the future.

New Publication: "Devil's Stones and Midnight Rites: Megaliths, Folklore, and Contemporary Pagan Witchcraft" in Folklore 125(1)

I am very pleased to announce the online publication of my fourth academic article, which has appeared in Folklore, the UK’s foremost journal of folkloristics. The article is titled “Devil’s Stones and Midnight Rites: Megaliths, Folklore, and Contemporary Pagan Witchcraft,” and started life as a paper presented at the first “Popular Antiquities: Folklore and Archaeology” conference held at the UCL Institute of Archaeology back in October 2011. The (unusually short) abstract is as follows: 

During the middle years of the twentieth century, British pioneers of Wicca, the neopagan witchcraft religion, adopted prehistoric megaliths as ‘sacred sites’ and appropriated the folklore that surrounded them for their own magico-religious purposes. In turn, Wiccan interpretations of such sites resulted in the creation of a new ‘alternative archaeological’ megalithic folklore.

An Interview with Thomas A. Dowson

This month at Albion Calling I am honoured to present archaeologist and rock art studies specialist Thomas A. Dowson, who has formerly lectured at the universities of Manchester, Southampton, and the Witwatersrand. Many will know Dowson for his pioneering work with David Lewis-Williams arguing that the cave art of Palaeolithic Western Europe was the product of a shamanistic belief system, while others will be aware of their important research into the pictographs of southern Africa, where he grew up. Others may instead know Dowson for his equally pioneering work in launching the field of queer archaeology, offering us a radical way of reassessing the discipline. He has since retired from academic archaeology to provide heritage tours of France and now runs the excellent Archaeology Travel website. Here he has taken a little time out of his busy schedule to offer us a fascinating insight into his career and research.

EDW: Growing up on a farm in (what is now) Zimbabwe, you took an early interest in the rock art produced by members of the San hunter-gatherer populations across southern Africa. Did you have direct access to these wonderful pictographs at the time, or was this an interest that was stemmed through school or some other such outlet?

TD: The farm we lived on was about seven miles south of what was then Salisbury, now the Zimbabwean capital Harare. The farm house had been built about fifty or so metres from a granite outcrop typical of that area. And it was in the sometimes very slight shelters of those “kopjes” as they are called that hunters and gatherers painted on the rock surfaces. The kopje behind our house had quite a large shelter with rock paintings in it. As it was north facing it was a great place to hangout. That must have been when I was six or seven. 

Although I can not recall what the paintings in that shelter looked like, they definitely stayed with me. At school, as part of an art project, we were required to find a rock and paint something on it. Although I forget the context of the project (it may very well have had something to do with learning about prehistory), I distinctly remember deciding to try and reproduce what I had seen on the rock back at the farm - or rather what I thought I had seen. I can still see the image I painted. The painful irony is that I painted a man with a spear chasing a zebra. A popular misconception of prehistoric rock art that I would go onto spend many years trying to dispel. I went on to become more interested in rock art while studying archaeology at university.

EDW: What made you decide to study archaeology at an academic level, and at university did you focus your attention on the rock art that had captivated your interest since childhood?

TD: For as long as I can remember I have been interested in evolution and science. And two historical figures, Charles Darwin and Marie Curie, fascinated me from an early age. As a child I almost certainly had a romanticised image of both of these people, which partly derived from a book I read at school about “great lives.” I greatly enjoyed playing with chemistry sets, and anything to do with Charles Darwin. One night I had to get permission from my parents to stay up late one ‘school night’ to watch a documentary about Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle. I was as excited about staying up late as I was about watching Charles Darwin. By the time I went to university then I wanted to be a scientist, more specifically to study past climates.

I enrolled for a Bachelor of Science degree at the University of the Witwatersrand, with majors in Botany and Geology. Rock art did not feature in my career plans. Geology turned out to be a big disappointment for me. Only because being in the mining capital of South Africa, the geology department was in effect a mining school. Two weeks of Palaeontology was tacked on to the end of the course, and that was all dinosaurs - which have never interested me!

At that time I was working in the campus bookshop with an archaeology student, and he suggested I should consider switching from geology to archaeology. Which I did. One day during my first year of archaeology, I was in the student reading room of the archaeology department and David Lewis-Williams came in looking for help to load up his vehicle for a field trip he was going on to the Drakensberg. The Drakensberg was somewhere I had longed to go to for years. And so I asked Lewis-Williams if he ever took students on field trips. He said I should leave my name and phone number of a piece of paper in his mailbox. It was months before he ever contacted me to join a field trip, and three years before I got to go to the Drakensberg.

EDW: In his recent lectures here in London, a colleague of yours, David Lewis-Williams, commented on his personal experiences with San communities learning about how their ancestors produced rock art and why; did you yourself get to spend much time with these communities?

TD: In December 1989, I visited the large and well known rock engraving site of Twyfelontein in Namibia for my book Rock Engravings of Southern Africa. Megan Biesele, the anthropologist who had taken David Lewis-Williams to meet a San community, was working in Namibia at the time. I had asked her if I could meet her. Megan suggested she come to Twyfelontein. During her brief visit to the site we discussed the rock art with the members of the San community who had come with her. Later Megan invited me to visit her in the Nyae Nyae region in northern Namibia, and to climb the Brandburg. I visited the San in Nyae Nyae for two weeks in 1990, but because I contracted malaria we never got to climb the Brandberg mountain.

Although the people I met through Megan were not direct descendants of the San peoples who made the rock art, the two weeks in Nyae Nyae still had a profound effect on me as a scholar. This was a time when the various misconceptions about San history were still quite prevalent, even amongst South Africa’s historians. After getting off the plane from Windhoek, David Lewis-Williams showed me the proofs of a photography book he had been asked to write the text for. The book was to be called The Bushman, A Vanished Way of Life. I was shocked. This title was the product of just one of the many misconceptions of the San communities in South Africa, that their way of life had long since disappeared and been relegated to study by prehistoric archaeologists. And in fact it was simply not true. It took a few days, but I eventually convinced Lewis-Williams that the title had to be changed. Not only was the title changed (the book was eventually called The Bushmen: A Changed Way of Life), but the publishers had to reprint the cover.

Dowson with David Lewis-Williams

EDW: Given the white supremacist socio-political domination of much of southern Africa at the time, and the effect that this had on archaeological interpretation (the case of Great Zimbabwe being perhaps the best known), did you feel that your interest in indigenous African archaeologies was in any way constrained or threatened by the authorities?

TD: There were always rumours about how the authorities were supposedly spying on us. Apparently, they were watching those archaeologists who were interested in, what was fashionable then, Marxist archaeology. Being at the University of the Witwatersrand during the 1980s this was nothing new, the campus was frequently raided by the security police. Looking back, however, I think I felt more intimidated and disturbed by some of the farmers whose land we had to access to get to rock art sites. Together with colleagues we heard and witnessed some horrific bigotry. That I will never forget.

EDW: You proceeded to work for ten years at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, where your research focused on San rock art. While based there, you co-wrote Images of Power: Understanding Bushman Rock Art (1989), Rock Paintings of the Natal Drakensberg (1992), and People, Politics, and Power: The Bushman People of Southern Africa (1995) with David Lewis-Williams, also co-editing the volume on Contested Images: Diversity in Southern African Rock Art Research (1994) with him. With Janette Deacon you produced Voices from the Past: !Xam Bushmen and the Bleek and Lloyd Collection (1995), and you are also responsible for Rock Engravings of Southern Africa (1992). As you must be aware, this was really pioneering, important stuff, exploring shamanistic explanations for these images and bringing in ideas from neuropsychology; looking back at this research now, it seems that it revolutionised the field of rock art studies. What was it like to be at the forefront of research in this area at the time, and how did your research begin to explore this enigmatic realm of shamanism?

TD: Yes, it was an exciting period in the study of rock art to have been a part of. When I read rock art research today, I am still amazed at how some aspects of what is said about what the images might have meant are now taken for granted. Back in the 1990s discussions about these issues, even amongst rock art scholars, were all but pitched battles. I still chuckle to myself when I see certain scholars use the term shamanism in a positive context! As important and pioneering as the work we were doing then was, there is still a long way to go. Our understanding of shamanism and its association with rock art is not without error and Eurocentric misconceptions.

Shamanism aside, I am more proud of the papers I published in the mid-1990s that sought to bring Bushman communities back into the history of South Africa, and not as people who simply made stone tools and hunted. Research that received very hostile receptions at history and archaeology conference in the early 1990s. Even from archaeologists. The idea that rock art is as important to South Africa’s history and any early colonial document might be is now taken for granted. In fact it would be absurd to think otherwise.

One of the popular misconceptions of the time, reproduced by all the leading South African historians in both popular and academic literature, was that the San people had either been pushed out of South Africa by the Black farming communities when they arrived about 2,000 years ago, or they played little role in the unfolding story of the subcontinent. Archaeologists did a lot of work to challenge this view: the San did not get pushed out of South Africa by the farmers, rather they stayed and enjoyed positive social and economic relations with the farmers. I took this idea a step further and showed we could use the rock art as a “historical document” to show that the San communities were as implicated in the various political events that have unfolded over the last two thousand or so years, following the arrival of pastoralists and farmers, up until and after the arrival of the whites in South Africa in the 1700s.

EDW: From there you turned your attention to look at the rock art of Western Europe. In particular you’ve looked at some of the Upper Palaeolithic cave art from modern France, and argued that the origins of these images might well be explained through the shamanism hypothesis. What inspired you to move from Southern Africa and into Upper Palaeolithic Europe?

TD: The Ice Age cave art of Europe was a project I started working on with David Lewis-Williams in the mid-1980s. Then as now, the Palaeolithic cave art of Europe was something of a holy grail for rock art scholars and archaeologists. An obvious reflection of the Eurocentricism that still pervades much of rock art research.

Given our approach to the rock art of southern Africa, what other rock art researchers were saying elsewhere, particularly in North America - notably Ken Hedges, Polly Schaafsma, Solveig Turpin, David Whitley - we thought there was a strong possibility that the rock art in Europe was also shamanistic. And so we set about to establish that - using the neuropsychology of altered states of consciousness. Something else that was received with a fair degree of hostility and derision. Now it’s a given.

EDW: Following your decade at Witwatersrand, you then moved to England, taking up a position at the University of Southampton, where you set up the world's first postgraduate course on prehistoric art. How did this scenario come about, and did you find it an easy experience? What was it like suddenly being transposed from the South African academic environment and being immersed in its British counterpart?

TD: For various reasons I was thinking about leaving Wits University. When the late Peter Ucko, then Dean of Arts at the University of Southampton, got in touch with me and suggested I visit him and Tim Champion, the then head of the Archaeology Department, I stopped over in Southampton on my way to a conference in the US. The idea of starting the World’s first dedicated rock art postgraduate degree programme was seductive and I was seduced. The experience was not as easy as I thought it would be. And I found the move to England to be very unsettling, personally and academically.

EDW: It was in 2000 that the World Archaeology journal published a volume edited by yourself that was devoted to “Queer Archaeologies.” Many of my readers will probably be unfamiliar with the term “queer archaeology”, so for their benefit, could you explain what exactly the term means to you? Did you have a background in queer theory, and how did you come to the decision to bring it into archaeology?

TD: I find it easier to say what queer theory is not, rather than what it is. Queer Archaeology, for me anyway - how I intended it, is not as so many think and use the term, about looking for “sexual deviants” in the past. It is not a gay agenda for exploring homosexuality in the past (not that that is not important - but that is another issue entirely). Because the word “queer” is often used as a short hand for gay, lesbian, transgender, bisexual, and I am sure I left someone out, “queer archaeology” is thought to be about looking for these sexual identities in the past. In one sense it can be. But I argue it is so much more than that.

Queer archaeology is about challenging an established norm that is somehow based in sexual politics. Although academics (myself included) were quick to appropriate it, the notion of “queer” did not start in academia, but rather in the politics of 1980s sexual liberation in the US. Certain activists were becoming aware of the normalising effect which labels such as “gay” and “lesbian” were having. And this is still powerfully observable in debates about “gay marriage.” Gays and lesbians in the West are now more “normal” than the heterosexuals who once shunned them! What has happened is gay is now to straight as women were/still are to men - subjugated and dominated. In their desire to go running up the aisle in a chiffon white dress, gay men and women have confused recognition with liberation. One only has to consider what the West is doing, or rather not doing, about gay men being burned alive in Uganda to find proof of this.

The queer activists challenged this by arguing that there was no such thing as a stable sexual identity. Queer theorists, and queer archaeology, went on to suggest that not only should we be challenging all that is accepted as the norm, but also to question the sexual politics that often lies at the heart of why something is considered the norm. A good controversial example I liked to use, is the chronocentric nature of archaeological endeavours.

In the 1990s many people, historians and archaeologists alike, said to me that I could not use rock art to construct South African history because I lacked a “firm chronological framework.” This is true, dating rock art is an incredibly difficult enterprise (I would say impossible). But just because we do not have Gregorian Calendar style dates attached to each image, it does not mean the imagery is useless for historical interests (and I demonstrated the possibilities). What interests me is why archaeology is so desperately hung up on having firm chronological frameworks. And I believe chronocentricism in archaeology is a symptom of phallocentricism - just as the lack of a penis renders you weak and of little use, so the lack of a firm chronological framework renders your interpretations useless.

Queer archaeology is about challenging the norm, and in some cases that is about challenging the idea of stable sexual identities in the past, but it is not (as I hope that I have demonstrated) restricted to that.

EDW: Did you feel that there was much opposition to your moves in this direction from within the academic archaeological community?

TD: You know, like most gay men of my age I have experienced homophobia - and of course there has been opposition. But I have also experienced support. I remember being incredibly nervous when I went to the World Archaeology editorial meeting at which I was to make my pitch for the “Queer Archaeologies” volume. I was so nervous I could barely speak, and my colleague and friend Yvonne Marshall had to take over the pitch for me. The idea was immediately accepted, there was not even the slightest murmur of doubt that it would be a topic worth including.

I was even more nervous when the volume was published. But, I received one email that made me think that I had done the right thing. An archaeologist from a Latin American country wrote to me and said “You have balls.” He added that he did not think he could ever come out where he worked, but it was good to know that there were other archaeologists like him. And I had other emails like that. They made it worthwhile because when I came out, I was told by a very prominent South African archaeologist that I could not be an archaeologist if I was going to be “openly that way.”

So the opposition has not really been an issue. I am more concerned, however, at how “Queer Theory” is misused in archaeology. It has become, as many predicted in the early 1990s, something of a bandwagon. But, in true “queer” fashion, that is not for me to try and control. I have had my say.

EDW: I’d be very interested to hear what role you think queer archaeology will have to play in the discipline over the coming decades? Talking from personal experience here in London, there is certainly a great interest in heritage and archaeology among LGBT and Queer communities, and so I’d also be intrigued to know if you feel that queer archaeology could potentially act as a tool to encourage greater LGBT participation in archaeology; a more relateable face if you will?

TD: As I am out of academia, I do not really feel I can comment on this. But I will recount a rather disturbing anecdote. In November 2012 I received an email out of the blue from a mature student who had started a postgraduate archaeology degree at University College London (UCL) in September 2012. This person was openly gay, and hoped to pursue research on some aspect of homosexuality in the past. Although I never met the person, from the email discussions we had, it seemed that they had their head screwed on. S/he had been involved in LGBT politics and counselling, and I was convinced s/he would do well. I was disappointed when in January 2013 I received an email to say s/he had packed it in. One of the reasons cited was the “lack of a LGBT support in archaeology.” For 2013, that is disgraceful, and I find it quite upsetting. That person has gone on to do a PhD in LGBT mental health issues. Archaeology’s loss is another discipline's gain.

I will say, as long as “Queer Archaeology” is seen as a manifesto for looking for homosexuality in the past, it will not be the force for change it could be.

EDW: In recent years you’ve ceased your life as a full time university lecturer and moved to Normandy, managing a B&B and organising archaeological tours of local sites associated with the Impressionist movement. You also run the excellent Archaeology Travel website, through which you provide information for tourists who have a particular interest in archaeological heritage; it’s a great resource and I encourage my readers to make use of it. What brought about this decision to make such a seemingly huge career change, and what do you see as the role of archaeological and art historical tourism in the 21st century?

TD: As a student I had my fair share of awful lecturers. When I started teaching archaeology, I always said that when I no longer enjoyed it on a day-to-day level, I would pack it in. For various reasons, some personal and some to do with the politics of higher education in the UK at the beginning of the 2000s, I no longer enjoyed being an academic archaeologist.

My last lecture was a general lecture on rock art in a first year course on World Prehistory. The lecture was good, not my best but I was happy with it. Walking back to my office I was behind two young guys who were discussing the lecture. One said, “That was the best lecture we have had all year.” The other replied, “Definitely.” Because I no longer enjoyed being in an academic environment, I packed it in - but I went out on a high.

And I look back on my time teaching and researching rock art and archaeology with very fond memories. I had some excellent students, many of whom have gone on to do wonderful things. It would be mean to single out a few, and far too long to enthuse about them all.

Now, I greatly enjoy pursuing my passion for the past by exploring sites and periods of prehistory I never did while I was researching rock art. I love the Romans. Cultural Heritage is becoming big business, as everyone wants to travel the World and see the famous sites for themselves. I think guardians of this heritage have the challenges they have always had, namely conservation and preservation, but on a scale never experienced before. People are still removing bricks from the Colosseum, taking frescoes from Pompeii, spraying graffiti on the amazing blocks of stone at Machu Picchu. And the physical effects of many more tourists climbing around the same sites continues to take its toll, and more so. Archaeology is going to have to play a much more active role in the growing movement of responsible tourism. I hope ‘Archaeology Travel’ will contribute to that, by encouraging people to look beyond the bucket list approach to the past.

EDW: Thank you Thomas for talking with us today!