Plaster casts. Basement, Museum of Classical Archaeology, Peterhouse, Cambridge. 1976. Reprinted 2026.

A precocious teenager, student of Classics, I was visiting Cambridge to talk with archaeologist David Clarke. With extraordinary generosity he gave a couple of hours to me to discuss not antiquity, but prehistory, how the field was a corrective and antidote to the kind of art and archaeological history that motivated my fascination with archaeology. I visited Heffer’s the bookstore and bought a copy of his extraordinary book Analytical Archaeology.

And before taking the train back home to the north east of England, I discovered that his college, and later mine, Peterhouse, was home to a collection, gathered in the nineteenth century, of plaster casts of Greek and Roman sculpture. Pre-historic indeed.