Format: Paper presentations with discussion
Convenors:
Graeme Barker,
McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge, UK
gb314@cam.ac.uk
Robin Torrence,
Australian Museum, Sydney
Robin.Torrence@australian.museum
Ezra Zubrow
University of Buffalo SUNY
ezubrow@gmail.com
The death of Colin Renfrew in December 2024 robbed archaeology of one of its intellectual titans. He was one of the first to recognise the significance of calibrated radiocarbon chronologies to generate new prehistories throughout the world. He pioneered new ways of thinking about the explanation of social and political change in the past, within and beyond the prehistoric Aegean that was his enduring passion. He demonstrated the power of archaeological theory and archaeological science working in tandem to enrich understanding of past societies, from dating to exchange systems to systems models to archaeogenetics. With characteristic energy and optimism he built collaborations with other disciplines to explore archaeological ‘intangibles’ like art, cognition and language. In deed and word he was one of the most effective advocates of the power of world archaeology to enrich people’s lives, and of calling out threats to it, such as the illicit antiquities market. The session will explore Colin Renfrew’s extraordinary contributions to the development of archaeological theory, method and synthesis and if and how they continue to impact on archaeological thinking and practice, in the knowledge that he revelled in robust debate and would certainly not have wanted an anodyne series of eulogies!
Papers:
Introduction: Treading in Giant Footsteps
Graeme Barker, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge, UK
We begin the session as we shall end it, celebrating Colin Renfrew’s profound impact as a teacher and mentor. As a result of meeting him when he was a Junior Research Fellow at St John’s College Cambridge, about to go to his first academic post at Sheffield University, I found myself the next day (!) abandoning my undergraduate degree in classics and switching to archaeology. As a student I excavated on his Greek Neolithic site Sitagroi. On graduating, with his encouragement I embarked on my Cambridge PhD on Italian prehistory at the British School at Rome. Three years later I was appointed to the lectureship at Sheffield University that Colin had vacated on getting his Chair at Southampton University. And in 2004, after academic positions at the British School at Rome and the University of Leicester, against all the odds I found myself back in Cambridge as his successor as Disney Professor of Archaeology and Director of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. Along the way we enjoyed many debates and disagreements on topics, including ones on which we shall be assessing his contributions in the rest of this session: on transitions to farming, on the emergence of civilisation, on archaeology and language; and on the ‘human revolution’. The mess and muddle of human decision-making that I often perceived in the archaeological record contrasted with the clarity of vision—and terrifying eloquence in its support—that he brought to his own visions of the past, but he always remained warm and generous in his support. We are all the poorer for his passing.
Colin Renfrew and the (Ongoing) Radiocarbon Revolution
Chris O. Hunt, School of Biological & Environmental Sciences, Liverpool John Moores University, UK
Paula Reimer, School of Natural and Built Environment, Queens University Belfast, UK
Graeme Barker, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge, UK
Radiocarbon dating, since its initiation in 1950, has completely revolutionised our understanding of timescales within the last 50,000 years of Earth history. In archaeological thought, the first application of radiocarbon dating initiated a paradigm shift, because dating enabled timescales, and thus ideas based on previous attempts at inferring age, to be reassessed, but this was resisted by many voices. Further reassessment followed the development of the calibration of radiocarbon dates, and Colin Renfrew played a leading part in building the new paradigm, with his manifesto Before Civilisation: The Radiocarbon Revolution and Prehistoric Europe, a call to arms for a new wave of European archaeologists enthused by the possibilities of investigating cultural change independent of culture history’s reliance on cross dating. Here, we reflect on the context of the book, Renfrew’s contribution to the ‘Radiocarbon Revolution’ in archaeological thought, and the continuing impact of developments in radiocarbon calibration, and the use of radiocarbon chronologies, on our understanding of the human past.
Tools of the Trade: Colin Renfrew and Understanding Exchange
Ellery Frahm, Yale University, USA
In collaboration with Johnson Cann and John Dixon, Colin Renfrew did more than successfully use spectroscopy to recognise trace-element fingerprints of Aegean and Near Eastern obsidian artefacts and their geological sources. Equally important as this technical success, Renfrew emphasised the substantial archaeological implications, especially the reconstruction of exchange. For the Aegean, this meant using obsidian transport to elucidate Cycladic, Minoan, and Mycenaean trade networks, and the focus for the Near East was the means by which farming and other developments spread during the Neolithic Period. These studies introduced concepts – such as fall-off curves, down-the-line trade, and monotonic decrement – that continue to shape models, theories, and interpretation of exchange six decades later. Indeed, in his view, studying exchange was crucial for understanding the emergence of early complex societies, including its role in economic specialisation and social hierarchies. He and John Cherry also devised the idea of peer-polity interaction, whereby societies affect one another via exchange, competition, and other forms of interaction. His legacy, though, is more than that. First, since 1991, virtually every college student taking an introductory archaeology class (me and my generation included) read the ‘Trade and Exchange’ chapter in his textbook with Paul Bahn. Second, he enthusiastically explored other materials (metal, marble, etc.) and methods (dating, isotopic analysis, etc.) whilst remaining focused on the goal: using them to address the big questions about the past (and the present), such as how exchange can drive innovation and social developments. That is a mindset that I have taken away from Colin Renfrew’s body of work, and it is also one that I strive to instill in the next generation of archaeologists.
The Emergence and the Kyklos: Colin Renfrew’s Aegean Longue Durée, 1962-2024
Cyprian Boodbank, University of Cambridge, UK
John Cherry, Brown University, USA
In 1972 Colin Renfrew’s The Emergence of Civilisation: The Cyclades and the Aegean in the Third Millennium BCchanged the interpretive trajectory of Aegean prehistory forever, and permanently upped its intellectual game. Yet, for Aegean archaeology, 1972 was but one early peak in Renfrew’s far longer engagement with Aegean prehistory, that began after his graduation at Cambridge in 1962 with his PhD work on the early Cycladic culture sequence and continued through his remarkable final fieldwork discoveries on the island of Keros seven decades later. This involved fieldwork and laboratory-based analyses, as well as new ways of thinking, and it reveals both deep long-term consistencies and boldly creative opportunism. For Renfrew, the Aegean proved thought-provoking as a place in-between, along multiple axes: radiocarbon and text-based chronologies; Europe and the Near East; anthropological archaeology and Classics; from genetics to philology. This paper evaluates Renfrew the Aegeanist in three respects. Firstly, his fundamental re-problematising of the nature and explanation of Bronze Age Aegean societies, and their transformations. Secondly, the impact of his Aegean fieldwork on what we know, and how we claim to know it. Thirdly, the sheer breadth of the lineages of onward Aegean research he fostered through his students, and their own academic descendants. It ends with an exhortation for this regional archaeology to recover, through Colin’s example, the innovative horizons, analytical flare, and exploitation of its exceptional advantages that once brought the Aegean to global prominence as an integral part of world archaeology.
Colin Renfrew and Early Markets
Richard Hodges, American University in Rome, Italy
As a teenager Colin Renfrew excavated at Canterbury, learning his craft as an archaeologist in an urban context. During the 1970s this experience prompted him to serve on public committees for urban archaeology. It was the conjunction of this service and his interest in the writings of the economist, Karl Polanyi, which led him to invite me to contribute to his Duckworth series. He made it clear that this book on medieval urban origins should be for ‘an audience in Arizona’. Influenced by Renfrew’s articles on Cycladic exchange networks, and his use of the New Archaeology to trace tribe to state formation in the archaeological record, I reappraised the genesis of medieval markets in my book Dark Age Economics (1982). By employing a combination of a processual approach with modern salvage archaeology data, and using these to challenge the canonical Pirenne thesis, the book attracted critiques by first historians and then archaeologists. These many critiques have led to major reappraisals of Polanyi’s work as well as the Pirenne thesis. Now, over forty years later, there is wide recognition among medieval historians that gift-exchange and redistribution were fundamental institutional features of the early Middle Ages, before markets emerged in western Europe after the ninth century.
Colin Renfrew the Evolutionary Archaeologist
Ezra Zubrow, University at Buffalo, USA
Patrick Daly, Washington University USA
Michael Frachetti, Washington University USA
In a series of articles and book chapters Colin Renfrew presented to archaeologists a model by which gradual change could produce catastrophes and then periods of stability. He applied it to various cultures and time periods. Over the next several decades it became a standard method for interpreting cultural development and redevelopment around the world. This paper takes a deep dive into understanding the mechanics of this model that came to be called cultural catastrophism. Societal resilience is a critical component to catastrophe recovery. In particular we examine the role of resilience in coping with major cultural shocks such as war, economic innovation, and political coups and natural shocks such as floods, earthquakes, and volcanoes. Areas of interest include prehistoric environmental degradation, reduction of standards of living, disruption of production and manufacturing supply chains, population displacement, increased political instability and heightened potential for armed conflicts. Geographically we focus upon the prehistoric Asia Pacific Region.
Colin Renfrew: The Social Archaeologist
Koji Mizoguchi, Kyushu University, Japan
Colin Renfrew revolutionised archaeology by applying general systems theory to the study of societal reproduction, transformation, and collapse. His systemic approach conceptualised past societies as dynamic entities sustained through the interaction of interdependent subsystems—economic, political, ideological, and so on—each contributing to societal stability while also being potential drivers of change. By framing social evolution as an emergent process shaped by feedback mechanisms, Renfrew provided archaeology with a powerful explanatory model for understanding why and how societies developed, persisted, and ultimately declined. Yet, retrospectively, his model reveals a fundamental limitation: while he sought to isolate social subsystems analytically, the inherent interconnectivity of these domains often defied such rigid categorisation. His analyses of production and exchange, for example, highlighted the economic subsystem’s role in structuring social complexity, but they did not fully account for how these activities were often imbued with symbolic-religious-ideological significance. The transformation of metallic substances, for instance, was not merely a technical or economic process but deeply enmeshed in supernatural belief systems, demonstrating that the economic and religious subsystems functioned as an integrated whole. We owe it to Renfrew for unwittingly exposing this tension, which later scholars sought to reconcile by moving beyond strict system-based compartmentalisation. In doing so, his work laid the groundwork for post-processual social archaeologies, which challenged deterministic models and embraced the fluidity and contingency of human intentionality and experience. His legacy continues to compel scholars to refine and expand the explanatory power of archaeology.
Colin Renfrew the Monument Man: Hail to the Chiefdom!
Mike Parker Pearson, University College London, UK
Some of us are old enough to remember Colin appearing on the Chronicle TV series in his characteristic dark blue mack and flat cap, explaining how megalith-building required social organisation and how social organisation required leaders – chiefs, in his view. His beloved Orkney was one place where he felt he could put these ideas to the test, concluding that a chiefdom must have been responsible for the great tomb of Maeshowe and the impressive Ring of Brodgar stone circle. In his opinion, Gordon Childe’s idea of primitive communists living at Skara Brae could no longer be entertained. Colin was also fascinated by the spatial distribution of megalithic monuments as territorial markers, defining an Atlantic façade of land-grabbing early Neolithic farmers and drawing Thiessen polygons as hypothetical territories around tombs. These approaches featured significantly in his book Before Civilisation and were published in greater detail in a series of papers in the 1970s. For his own contribution to his monumentally large 1971 conference on ‘the Explanation of Culture Change’, he proposed a model of social evolution for prehistoric Wessex from early Neolithic tribal societies to late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age chiefdoms, culminating in a veritable confederation of chiefdoms to build Stonehenge. Although much has changed since the 1970s in both knowledge and approach to studying Neolithic monumentality, Colin’s provocative thinking opened up new questions and research directions – giant footsteps for the rest of us to follow in.
Colin Renfrew and the Archaeology/Language Debate
Nicholas Evans, Australian National University, Australia
Colin Renfrew’s legacy to our understanding of the deep past was a fraught and subtle one. On the one hand his work, particularly on Indo-European origins, demonstrated how much we can learn through combining the different views of the elephant given by synthesising evidence from archaeology, linguistics, genetics (and we can add anthropology, oral history, palaeobotany and others). On the other, he warned continually, and correctly, about the dangers of circularity where each discipline builds on shaky beliefs purporting to be part of its own knowledge but ultimately smuggled in from somewhere else. Using Renfrew’s wise guidance, I seek to extend this creative tension between consilience and discord, focussing on two questions at the geographical heart of where this conference is being held. First, are all Australian languages related, deriving from a single and reconstructable common ancestor? Second, if they are, how long ago was that ancestral language spoken, and where? Linguists are increasingly answering the first question in the affirmative, and in great detail. But to the second, it is common to offer answers based on putative ‘time horizons of reconstructability’, maximally around 10,000 years ago: such models generate maximal discord with the evidence from archaeology, geomorphology and genetics for a peopling of Australia at least 65,000 years ago. These are issues that challenge traditional linguistic practice, but I propose how we might move forward to combine the insights of archaeology and linguistics.
Colin Renfrew and the Genetics Revolution
Toomas Kivisild, KU Leuven, Belgium
‘Archaeogenetics’ emerged in the late 1990s as a new research field that applies molecular genetic techniques to answer questions about early population histories in the light of evidence and questions brought forward by prehistoric archaeology. These questions are set in a broader inter-disciplinary context that often involves synthesis of evidence for continuity or movement of people with their material culture and languages. Introduced by Colin Renfrew first at the meetings he organised in Cambridge, which brought together archaeologists, geneticists and linguists, it became rapidly a widely used umbrella term for cross-field synthesis aiming research across the whole world. The global reach certainly reflects the enormous breadth of interests that Renfrew had and graciously shared with his peers, ranging from questions about the origins and spread of the Indo-European languages, relationships between prehistoric groups who may have spoken proto forms of Elamite and Dravidian, to questions about the genetic signatures left behind the spread of Pama-Nyungan languages in Australia. This paper will review the progress made to address the selected key themes in archaeogenetics as the technologies enabling whole genome sequencing from both modern and ancient sources have undergone exponential phase of growth.
Colin Renfrew and the (Changing) Archaeology of Mind
Lambros Malafouris, University of Oxford, UK
What do we mean by ‘mind’ in the archaeology of mind? From the early days of cognitive archaeology, Colin Renfrew was critically aware of the problems with many cognitivist assumptions and their influence on how archaeologists interpret human cognition and construct inferences about past ways of thinking from material remains. My presentation traces the evolution of Renfrew’s thinking and its impact on contemporary cognitive archaeology and archaeological theory. I will explore particularly his contributions to redefining the relationship between cognition and material culture. Renfrew pioneered an anti-internalist and processual approach to cognitive archaeology, emphasising that mind emerges from the human engagement with the material world. I will focus on three notions, problems and questions that have been pivotal in Renfrew’s ouevre: (a) the sapient paradox, (b) the constitutive symbol, and (c) the prestige nexus in the emergence of property and ownership. These ideas have reshaped archaeological discourse by integrating materiality and long-term cultural transformations into the study of cognition.
Colin Renfrew and the Archaeology of Art
Chris Gosden, University of Oxford, UK
Colin Renfrew (with Lambros Malafouris) developed the idea of material engagement, where human intelligence and understanding derived from the interactions between the body and the world. Meaning was not something carried in the head, but arose out of engaging with objects. Objects made in the same style, that is with similar and recognisable qualities of form, help channel perception leading also to understandings of the world which can be shared. I was lucky enough to engage with Colin in this area and applied these insights to objects of so-called Celtic and Scythian art. In this paper, I will review the inspiration I derived from Colin, the debates we engaged in and the areas in which I developed these ideas further. I will take examples from Eurasian art styles to develop my points.
Colin Renfrew and the Illicit Trade in Antiquities
Neil Brodie, independent researcher
Within academia, Colin Renfrew is known primarily for his innovative contributions to archaeological theory and practice. His archaeological prominence also guaranteed him a public platform for expressing concern about problems facing archaeology, especially about the damaging consequences of the illicit trade in antiquities. But Colin was also a politician – he was elevated to the United Kingdom’s House of Lords in June 1991 as Lord Renfrew of Kaimsthorn. He used his position in the House of Lords to protect and promote the interests of archaeology, both within the United Kingdom and abroad. Together, his public profile and political connections were crucial for effecting institutional and governmental policy implementations aimed at reducing illicit trade. Following his retirement in 2004 and his gradual withdrawal from public life, it became clear that the illicit trade has continued to thrive: there is a gap in communication between researchers and policy-makers that Colin is no longer available to bridge. He is sorely missed and will be hard to replace in combating the ever more serious threats to world heritage represented by the trade in illicit antiquities.
“I Think We Ought to Go to Easter Island”: Colin Renfrew and Public Archaeology
Mike Pitts, independent researcher, UK
Something extraordinary happened to archaeology in 1970, when David Collison, a television producer, phoned Colin Renfrew. The call led to the first of eight Chronicle TV films, which Colin presented or appeared in. He featured in many other films and radio programmes, with figures ranging from Peter Haggett and Jacquetta Hawkes to Jimmy Mellaart and Andy Goldsworthy; on one occasion, he followed The Today Programme’s news that Barack Obama had been elected president with a discussion about the display of antiquities. Colin Renfrew, then, had an impressive broadcasting career (and incidentally left a precious archive). But what made it extraordinary was the approach to communicating archaeology. In 1970 a group of men chanced together when the BBC’s documentary focus was on researched content and story-telling; when broadcasters liked to challenge audiences; when budgets allowed for long development times and world-wide locations. None of that would have mattered but for what Colin brought to the mix. He was no talking head: broadcasting for him was an opportunity to learn about new worlds and try out new ideas that fed into his more academic research–and the viewer and listener could feel part of that discovery process. How did that happen? Could it, or should it, be repeated today? The answers lie in what we mean by public archaeology. Colin Renfrew’s example shows how the distinctions between ‘public’ and ‘archaeology’ need to be rethought, to the benefit of all.
Never Backward in Coming Forward: Colin Renfrew as Influencer
Robin Torrence, Australian Museum, Sydney, Australia
As the papers in this session demonstrate, over multiple decades Colin Renfrew led the field in diverse arenas of archaeological scholarship. This session highlights the impressive scope of his fundamental contributions, noting his major influences on practices ranging from excavation to genetics, linguistics, and theory building. Colin was never one to avoid controversy, as illustrated by his radically innovative reinterpretations of the past, his efforts as an academic and a member of the House of Lords to protect cultural heritage, and his active participation in the World Archaeological Congress. One source of his immense impact on archaeology that perhaps has been noted less often, but also demands recognition, is his role as teacher and mentor. During Renfrew’s long tenure as a university lecturer and professor, he had an enormous impact on the discipline of archaeology through inspiring and guiding students and younger faculty from Britain and across the world, many of whom went on to have stellar careers. Over the years his mentees have enjoyed sharing favorite ‘Colin stories.’ These memories focus on his willingness to listen and engage with new ideas, the championing of his students, his kindness, enjoyment of a good party, and friendship.