Reuben Thorpe
My original degree is in Archaeology and Prehistory undertaken at Sheffield University between 1985 and 1988, while managing to dig in the holidays and the summers. I secured my first site supervising job just before graduation and following graduation worked as an illustrator in the drawing office at the University. During this time I was also a tutor for first year undergraduates, setting and marking course work, interspersing this also with work directing archaeological investigation for the Peak Park. I then moved to work in Lincolnshire as senior archaeologist directing works on a number of urban and rural sites before the mini-crunch cut development led archaeology and I went and worked in France for Prof. John Collis. After a brief fight with cancer work in North Yorkshire digging for the National Trust and then supervising for the Central Excavation Unit rehabilitated me and a brief but immensely enjoyable spell digging deserted medieval villages in Milton Keynes was followed by more supervisory work, this time in Leicestershire for the Leicester Archaeological Unit working on Iron age rural sites and then deeply stratified excavations in Leicester itself. Moving to a permanent job for the then Central Excavation Unit of English Heritage I undertook and ran excavations of varying sizes all over the country and spent 18 months directing the building recording and excavations at Battle Abbey. In 1995 I was recruited to lead the Anglo-Lebanese Excavations in Beirut which I did up to Late 2001. During this time I also acted as a consultant to the World Bank and contributed to teaching the fieldwork and post excavation MA course at the AUB. On my return to the UK I worked as a consultant to EH, Briefly for Dominic Powlesland at Heslerton and then as a project Manager for Albion Archaeology and later Wessex Archaeology where managed all the London based project officers as well as my own portfolio of commercial fieldwork. I even managed occasionally to get a trowel in my hand.
In 2006 we had just had a baby and I realised that I was being remiss, being a new Dad, working at WA and trying to write up sites in the evenings and weekends created, shall we say, tensions in my domestic life. It dawned that if I ever wanted to spend time with my newborn children and fulfil my moral obligation to publish I had to get on the case. There were also one or two books that I just had to write on field and post-excavation methodology, and also a PhD inside me that had been longing to get out. Thus I reluctantly resigned from Wessex and, the opportunity having presented itself I moved to the Republic of Macedonia, where apart from doing my PhD and one Beirut monograph I also undertook consultancy work for the CoE in Kosovo and for NGO's in Macedonia. I now live in Sweden where I intend to finish my PhD thesis. lose my suntan and complete the rest of my publication commitments, while also doing occasional teaching on applied archaeology. We only have one life and it comes with obligations.
In 2006 we had just had a baby and I realised that I was being remiss, being a new Dad, working at WA and trying to write up sites in the evenings and weekends created, shall we say, tensions in my domestic life. It dawned that if I ever wanted to spend time with my newborn children and fulfil my moral obligation to publish I had to get on the case. There were also one or two books that I just had to write on field and post-excavation methodology, and also a PhD inside me that had been longing to get out. Thus I reluctantly resigned from Wessex and, the opportunity having presented itself I moved to the Republic of Macedonia, where apart from doing my PhD and one Beirut monograph I also undertook consultancy work for the CoE in Kosovo and for NGO's in Macedonia. I now live in Sweden where I intend to finish my PhD thesis. lose my suntan and complete the rest of my publication commitments, while also doing occasional teaching on applied archaeology. We only have one life and it comes with obligations.
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was never completely finished and the publication of the Stratigraphy Conference proceedings has been cancelled. This chapter then draws together aspects of both papers, as the debate is still one with relevance today and includes an expansion of my thinking (up to June 2010) on other areas addressed by my original paper given in the Reconsidering the on-site relationship between subject, object, theory and
practice session of the Theoretical Archaeology Group conference in at York in 2007. In the following paper I agree with Shanks and McGuire (1996), Berggren and Hodder (2003) and Chadwick (2003) that for the actual excavator and specialist
much current practice is characterised by alienation from the process of interpretation. Where I disagree is with the attribution of the causes of this alienation. In my view the causes do not lie in a tradition of pseudo-objectivity within British Archaeology,
nor are they to be found in revisionist and partial readings of the history of the development of approaches to archaeological fieldwork in Britain. Alienation from the process of interpretation is not a consequence of processual field methodology,
nor the specific absence of a post-processual field method. Instead, I argue that the current state of archaeological field practice in Britain is due almost entirely to the social, political and economic context of the production of archaeological data.
I conclude that any attempt to (re)empower the interpretive arm of the excavator must actively engage with and address, first and foremost, these circumstances "