Acknowledging Inspirations in a Lifetime of Shifting and Pivoting Standpoints to Construct the Past

Abstract

In this Perspective article, I am able to draw the various strands of my intellectual thinking and practice in archaeology and European prehistory into a complex narrative of changing themes. In this narrative, I draw attention to the inspirational triggers of these transformations to be found in works and words of colleagues and events within and outside my immediate discipline. A group of events between 1988 and 1993 disrupted (in a good way) the trajectory of my professional life and provided a convenient anchor around which my themes pivoted and regrouped with very different standpoints. But some trends in my way of working remained constant and contributed, I hope, to a career of cumulative knowledge. Along the way, I show the significance, in terms of my personal intellectual context as well as archaeological practice in general, of my published works as well as more obscure and some unpublished works that are cited here for the first time.