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Philip Rahtz.
Living Archaeology.
Tempus. 2001

This is the life-story of one of Britain’s most influential and colourful archaeologists, whose career has spanned the second half of the twentieth century. After earlier short-lived careers in accountancy, the Royal Air Force, photography and school-teaching, Philip Rahtz stumbled into archaeology after the Second World War – and never looked back. Today, in his eightieth year, he is the oldest archaeologist in the country to be still active in digging, writing and lecturing.

Having started as a freelance field archaeologist, he was appointed to a lectureship in the University of Birmingham in 1963, and in 1978 he founded a new department at the University of York. Over the years he has excavated many important sites of all periods in England such as the Saxon and medieval palaces at Cheddar, the Cistercian Bordesley Abbey and several Dark Age sites in Somerset, including Glastonbury Tor and the 500-grave cemetery at Cannington. He has also dug in Yugoslavia, Greece, Spain and Ghana.

But Professor Rahtz’s is much more than a catalogue of remarkable excavations. We learn about his family, childhood and adolescence; the progression from backward boy to professor; his philosophy, political stance, his musical and other tastes – and his strongly held views on sexuality. His easy, anecdotal style, spiced with some fairly scandalous stories, will ensure that this is a life-story that will appeal to anyone with an interest in archaeology.