List members may be interested in seeing the text of Graeme
Barker's obituary of Tim potter which appeared in the Dailty
Telegraph last week. Since this has appeared in a national
newspaper it may not be reproduced without their permission.
------- Forwarded message follows -------
Dr Tim Potter
Roman archaeologist, Keeper of Prehistoric and Romano-British
Antiquities at the British Museum
Tim Potter, who died at the tragically early age of 55 on 11
January, was a Roman archaeologist of great ability, ebullience,
and style. He often said that he modelled himself consciously on
John Ward-Perkins, Director of the British School at Rome at the
time Potter was a postgraduate student there in the 1960s. Like
him, much of Potter's best fieldwork was in Italy, like him he
worked zealously to promote the British School of Rome as a
centre of archaeological excellence, and they certainly both spoke
the same kind of Italian - fluently, with an unrepentantly plummy
Oxford accent. Yet in many respects Potter was also one of the
best British exemplars of Sir Mortimer Wheeler's legacy: like him
he was a brilliant excavator, who passionately believed in getting a
good story out of the earth, and telling it well. He loved to recount
how he directed his first excavation when he was a 14-year old
schoolboy with his brother Christopher, at a Roman site near the
family home in March, Cambridgeshire. He went on in his
professional career to conduct significant excavations of other
Roman sites in northwest England and the Fens, Italy, and North
Africa.
Born 6 July 1944, Potter was educated at March Grammar School,
in part by his schoolmaster father, and after graduating in 1966 in
Archaeology and Anthropology at Trinity College, Cambridge, he
won the Rome Scholarship in Classical Studies at the British
School at Rome, which became his research base for his
Cambridge PhD. Ward-Perkins at that time was coordinating a
series of archaeological field-walking surveys in South Etruria, the
countryside north of Rome, where mechanized agriculture and the
post-war building boom were visibly destroying hundreds of
archaeological sites, leaving them as scatters of potsherds in the
ploughsoil. Potter was one of a series of PhD students allocated a
piece of South Etruria by Ward-Perkins to survey by walking over
the ploughed fields to map the ancient settlements and date them
from their pottery: his PhD was a study of the settlement
archaeology of part of the 'Ager Faliscus', the territory of the
ancient pre-Roman Faliscan tribe.
In the course of his survey Potter located a series of rather
unprepossessing archaeological deposits on the hillslopes below a
known Faliscan site, Narce, and in excavations between 1966 and
1971 revealed a remarkable 1500-year story of how the settlement
had developed from a collection of Bronze Age huts to an important
and wealthy town at the time of the Roman conquest (A Faliscan
Town in South Etruria, British School at Rome 1976), a sequence
still unrivalled in the region. He conducted several smaller
excavations of Roman and medieval sites in South Etruria in the
1970s, and in 1979 brought all the South Etruria survey and
excavation data together in a brilliant synthesis (The Changing
Landscape of South Etruria, Paul Elek 1979) that remains one of
the finest examples of regional landscape archaeology in Europe.
After a spell as a Visiting Professor at the University of California,
Santa Cruz, and as the Sir James Knott Fellow at the University of
Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Potter was appointed in 1973 to a
lectureship in archaeology at the University of Lancaster, a post he
held until his move to the British Museum in 1978. At Lancaster he
gathered together a lively and able group of young staff, most of
whom shared his interests in Italian archaeology. However,
alongside his Italian excavations, he also involved his students in
important fieldwork investigating the Roman conquest and
subsequent processes of Romanization closer to home,
excavations published with exemplary thoroughness and speed
(Romans in North-West England: Excavations at Ravenglass,
Watercrook and Bowness-on-Solway, Cumberland and
Westmoreland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society 1979).
With some of these excavations still in train, he embarked on yet
another major project, excavations in the city of Cherchel in
Algeria, the ancient city of Iol Caesarea, where he and his Algerian
colleague N. Benseddick succeeded in teasing out from complex
and intractable stratigraphy (in an increasingly difficult political
environment, too) a remarkably complete story of the development
of the city from Punic origins to French colonialism - modern urban
archaeology at its best (Fouilles du Forum de Cherchel: Rapport
Finale, Bulletin d'Archeologie Algerienne 1993). He was elected
Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1980.
In 1978 Potter joined the British Museum as an Assistant Keeper
in the Department of Prehistoric and Romano-British Antiquities,
rising to Deputy Keeper in 1989 and Keeper in 1995. He remained
an active field archaeologist throughout his time at the BM, his two
most important projects being major excavations at the Roman
settlement of Stonea in the Fenland with his department colleague
Ralph Jackson and, with Anthony King, of a rich Roman and early
medieval settlement at Monte Gelato a few kilometres from Narce,
both published fully and lavishly (Excavations at Stonea,
Cambridgeshire, British Museum Press 1996; Excavations at the
Mola di Monte Gelato, British School at Rome 1997). As Keeper
he threw himself into three huge tasks: moving the department out
of its traditional accommodation as part of the massive building and
refurbishment programme that is still underway; renewing the
galleries in prehistoric and Romano-British archaeology (which
opened in 1997); and planning his department's role in the new
Study Centre in the Great Court. After long involvement in various
British School at Rome committees he was an effective Chairman
of its Faculty of Archaeology, History and Letters in 1991-1996,
and was particularly proud of his recent appointment as President
of the Royal Archaeological Institute.
Potter delighted in being a larger-than-life figure striding across the
archaeological stage. He could sometimes be deliberately and
outrageously pompous in word (but never in deed), promptly
deflating himself with a joke told against himself. At his Narce
excavations he liked to saunter out from his caravan three or four
hours after his team had started digging (at dawn), in silk dressing
down, cigarette in one hand and a bottle of iced beer in the other,
to check on progress, before reparing to the nearby village for a
friendly barman's version of his full English breakfast. At Santa
Cruz he lectured in his Cambridge gown in the proper manner of his
old university teachers, to the consternation of late 1960s
Californian students [NB the Daily Telegraph edited this bit out!:
and he loved to tell how when he went to the Dean to complain
about the cannabis haze in the lecture rooms, the Dean waved his
own joint at him and sent him on his way! He alone in the annals
of Rome Scholars managed the unique feat of getting his small Fiat
airborne across a rock-covered roundabout that unexpectedly
appeared in his path in the Villa Borghese gardens.]
In over a dozen books and over 100 scholarly papers Potter wrote
incisively on most of the major themes of Roman archaeology -
conquest and Romanization, urban and rural life, industry, trade,
religion, and more besides. His excavation reports present all the
necessary detail of stratigraphies, finds reports and so on, but he
was unrivalled in his generation for marshalling all this detail into a
good story - history from the spade par excellence. His Roman
Italy (British Museum Press 1987) is his scholarship and writing at
its best - authoritative and accessible. His public lectures were the
same, and enormous fun as well. A professional archaeologist to
his fingertips, much respected and liked throughout the profession,
Potter was delightful company, entirely without malice, kind to
colleagues throughout the profession and ever generous in his
praise of them, and always an enthusiastic supporter of younger
scholars and students embarking on research. [Unfortunately the
Daily Telegrapoh edited that last sentence out about how he
supported younger scholars, which was a great pity, because it
was one of Tim's greatest contributions, especially to Italian
archaeology.] In 1985 he was saved from further years of his
chaotic bachelor life [they also rephrased that!] by marriage to
Sandra Bailey; he delighted in the family life she created for him
and their son and daughter.
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Dr Mark PEARCE,
Dept of Archaeology, University of NOTTINGHAM, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK.
tel. +44.(0)115.951.4839; fax. +44.(0)115.951.4812; email [log in to unmask];
URL http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/archaeology/staff/mpearce.htm
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