ABSTRACT
Getting at the people is the core activity of archaeology. Finding objects, and then analysing and interpreting them, is what we do most of the time. What we must never lose sight of amidst the excitement are those people. It is all too easy to find both dispirited and perfectly content archaeologists who, like Arthur’s knights in search of the Holy Grail, have either given up or forgotten that they were even trying to look for them. As a result the people, individually or collectively, can very soon get lost in the details of report writing, the catalogues of coins and carp’s tongue swords, the syntheses by region and period, the textbooks by topic and theme: the grist but not the grail.
