The Pitcairn Perspectives by Philip Spires - HTML preview

File under Obituaries, Pitcairn, Edward, archaeologist

Author Sarnu Onggo, PhD, Archaeology, Hackney Metro University, 1997

Date 25 September 2017 (prepared at the onset of Professor Pitcairn’s 70^th birthday)

Professor Edward Pitcairn PhD (8 August 1947 - ?), Professor of Archaeology, Hackney Metro University

“History forever teaches us new ways of not repeating our failures.” These were the opening words of the very first lecture I heard Edward Pitcairn deliver. I copied them verbatim as he spoke, and I still have the notes from that day, framed on my wall. I was a twenty-one-year-old average freshman at the time, intimidated by my first day in class at a London University. I had chosen to study a subject that my family did not even recognize as a discipline, since it did not relate in any way they could imagine to the process of ‘getting on’, earning money or achieving status, so completely did they see education as a purely functional, not intellectual pursuit. But already, on that first morning, I heard a phrase that crystallized for me all the justification I might ever need for having taken my decision to study archaeology and to study it at Hackney Metro under the supervision of the already legendary Professor Edward Pitcairn.

Edward Pitcairn had been appointed Professor of Archaeology at Hackney Metro long before I arrived for my first day. Indeed, he had been in post from as long ago as the seventies. In October 1992, when that first class was given, Professor Pitcairn had already secured what remains, perhaps, his greatest achievement, which was to identify and excavate several of the aboriginal archaeological sites at Watulapitiyalu in Northern Territories, Australia. His long-term collaborator, Professor Gina Chupesi of Queensland University, with whom he worked for over twenty years, once described him as “…so thorough that he never left a stone unturned”. It was a description that always drew a laugh from him, no matter how many times he heard it. His habitual comment in response was. “If I had been a binman, they would have said he never left a dustbin unemptied”, a testament to the fact that all he ever wanted to achieve was competence. It was also a clear indication of his lifelong association with socialism and workers’ rights and his refusal to dwell upon or even acknowledge the status of his position. He was, of course, devastated when Professor Chupesi died in a car accident in 1999, an event that was to transform his life and, indeed my own.

Edward Pitcairn was born on August 8, 1947, a date that for me, as a result of my Chinese heritage, signifies luck, or at least the possibility of experiencing it, especially in the area of wealth. Edward Pitcairn did realize that lucky start, by apparently never opting in his life to pursue anything that proved a dead end.

His parents, George and Eliza Pitcairn were both professionals, the father a doctor and the wife a teacher. Their lives had been disrupted by the war. They had planned to marry earlier, but George Pitcairn joined the army as a Medical Officer in 1939 at the outbreak of the war and remained in the service for six years until 1945. Eliza Thomas, later Pitcairn, was a teacher and thus in a reserved profession. She accompanied various groups of students evacuated from London during the bombing of the capital and spent most of those years in Dorset. The couple married in 1946 and Edward, their only child, was born just over a year later, when both parents were already in their thirties.

I mention this fact here because Edward Pitcairn, himself, often referred to it. His childhood, it seemed, was still very close, perhaps because he shared so much of it only with himself. Both his parents were over thirty years older than him and busy pursuing their own careers. As a result, he said, he was often left to his own devices as a child, often played alone and was thus free to develop his own interests independently, without social or peer pressure. This focus on what he himself perceived as right for him seemed to provide a framework for his future relationships.

The family home was established on the rural Dorset coast, Eliza Pitcairn having fallen in love with the area during her wartime exile there. She became headmistress of a local primary school, which, in keeping with the enrolment demands of the area, was small, but had a stable intake of about forty students per year, mainly children from families involved in agricultural pursuits, who often walked considerable distances to get to school. George Pitcairn became a general practitioner, a position he never sought to change, and thus the couple soon adopted and retained a status close to that of local aristocracy by merit. When Eliza’s school was closed in the early 1960s, she was transferred to Wareham, where she worked until her retirement in the seventies, while George remained the local doctor throughout the rest of his working life.

The family, thus, was perceived as a ‘pillar of the community’, a terrible cliché, it’s true, but in the case of this family, it was nothing less than accurate. Though outsiders, they became completely accepted in local life. Indeed, such was their status that they were often called upon to officiate at community gatherings, such as opening fetes, judging flower shows and the like. For Edward Pitcairn, this meant that from an early age he grew accustomed to bearing public responsibility and comfortable with occupying a position of authority and thus became completely at ease with being in the spotlight. In one less capable than Edward, this might have bred arrogance or even snobbery, but in his case the result was the development of an acutely, perhaps over-developed sense of responsibility for other’s welfare. The consequence was that he was always capable of exercising authority and engendering trust, but he never sought to control, to exploit or to dominate.

Edward Pitcairn, perhaps because of his relative isolation as an only child in a rural setting, perhaps because of some innate drive, soon became interested in history. He and the family would regularly visit castles, stately homes, museums and churches in the county and further afield on holiday. Edward once described to me how he would build his own castles on the beach, constructing battlements of true Romantic fantasy so that he could populate them with toy soldiers. He would lie on the ground or, more often than not, on the wet sand to view his creations from below as a way of imagining how impressive they might be if they were actually built. I remember his description of constructing them close to the incoming tide and then watching them being eroded and demolished by the sea, always wondering if and how any memory of their grandeur might survive.

Edward’s early education was received as a combination of home tuition and formal schooling. He attended the primary school where his mother worked, but it became clear early on that the learning environment in the local school was unsuitable. The school’s students, as I have said, were largely from farming families or those of agricultural labourers. The former group seemed to regard education as treading water until they took over the farm and the latter group were largely uninterested in learning. By the time Edward was seven, his parents, noting how the boy craved for more than his current educational environment could offer, decided to send him away to a private school some fifty miles distant, where he became a weekly boarder, spending weekends at home with his parents. The school in question, Westmead, was not academically in the top league, but always claimed moderate success for its students and had the advantage of having secondary education on the same site as the junior school. Edward stayed at the school throughout, eventually achieving ‘A’ levels in History, English and Geography, before embarking on an archaeology degree in London.

It was at Westmead, on entering the secondary school, where Edward met a man whom he himself described as his mentor, history teacher David Pleasance. David was an Oxford graduate who was driven by a passion for education. Obviously noting an interest in his subject on behalf of the young student, he took Edward Pitcairn almost into his personal intellectual care. Edward once described to me how David Pleasance would give him personal tuition on ancient civilisations. In later years, Edward would assist Mr Pleasance in organising weekends away in London for interested boys, trips during which their teacher would conduct them through the galleries of the British Museum. Students and teacher would stay for free in the large house owned by David Pleasance’s parents, four or five at a time. It would thus take the full year to expose a complete class to the visit, but Edward, as an assistant organiser, used to go every time.

Edward took a First at Queen’s College, London, and then embarked on his doctorate, which focused on the then little appreciated area of Aborigine culture in Australia. The interest seems to have arisen by virtue of his having been introduced to the subject at Queen’s by Professor Gordon Chalmers, who was an authority in the area. Professor Chalmers was already involved in excavations in Australia and involved the young doctoral student in the practicalities of his research from the start. Undoubtedly, this introduction to practical archaeology cemented in Edward Pitcairn the idea that fieldwork was of paramount importance, perhaps more important even than analysis and publication. Edward Pitcairn thus began an association with subject matter that would preoccupy him for the rest of his working life, given that his eventual involvement in the prehistory of Indonesia was, at least for him, merely an extension of a regional interest that had developed primarily in northern Australia.

He took up a teaching position at Queen’s on completion of his PhD as a lecturer on what were called at the time “Ethnic Studies”, since archaeology proper was a title that excluded the arguably non-human. At that time, he also began his own field work in Northern Territories having met with Professor Chupesi at a conference during the early 1970s where the two academics presented a co-authored paper on the possibility of excavating the Watulapitiyalu gorges. The colleagues soon embarked upon their ground-breaking work at the site, the first publication of their results appearing in 1976, by which time Edward had already moved to Hackney Metro, his early award of a chair in 1979 arising directly out of the already high profile work he was conducting in Australia.

To this day, the Watulapitiyalu project, which developed in both depth and breadth over the next two decades, was instrumental in changing the way the archaeological establishment viewed so-called ‘tribal’ prehistory, art and culture. Though the dating scheme that the Pitcairn-Chupesi research established has since been modified, the general thrust of their argument, that these cultures were both ancient and long-lasting, has now become accepted as the norm. At the start of their work, remnants of colonial attitudes still dominated academic opinion, and much of the Aboriginal culture of the region was seen as unworthy of detailed study. Over the two decades of their collaboration, the colleagues published either together or singly more than fifty papers and presented their findings at more than thirty conferences. Professor Chupesi was awarded membership of the Order of Australia in recognition of her achievement. It was frequently rumoured that Professor Pitcairn had been offered an honour by his own country, but equally often rumoured that he had refused the award because its title referred to the British Empire, a concept which he detested, especially since the source of his achievement was in Aboriginal Australian culture, a reality that British Imperialism had denied even existed. Edward Pitcairn, himself, always refused to comment, neither confirming the offer nor denying his refusal.

Edward Pitcairn’s private life was a happy one. He met his wife, Penelope, always known as Penny, at university and they married just after they both graduated in 1969. Their only daughter, Gemma, was born in 1970 and the family lived in north London, at first sharing the house with Penny’s parents, David and Mary Stead, who, after establishing a highly lucrative shared accountancy practice, had already entered semi-retirement and had taken to spending most of their time in their cottage in Gloucestershire. Edward and Penny, thus, effectively had the house to themselves from the start and it soon became a veritable social centre for Hackney Metro staff and developed a reputation for hosting frequent and animated political meetings. Edward had stayed at Queen’s for just two years, the early offer of a professorship at Hackney Metro university on the strength of his Australia work tempting him to accept the apparently lower status position because of the academic freedom it offered. Throughout, Penny was a career teacher and worked in London schools, specialising in Learning Support tuition.

Edward Pitcairn joined Hackney Metro at a time when the university was quite new, its status having been changed from that of a polytechnic in the sixties. At the time, such institutions were conscious of being perceived as being of inferior status compared to older, longer established universities and he was granted great freedom to establish a significant archaeology department, with a strong emphasis on research. It is testimony to Edward Pitcairn’s achievement that, via his Aborigine work and later his Indonesian studies, he achieved precisely the status that was envisaged, thus enhancing the academic reputation of the entire institution. The fact that the department was absorbed into a broader faculty structure in 2012, with Edward taking early retirement, is more a reflection of the changing priorities in higher education rather than a comment on his work.

My own graduation from the department was in 1997. I had pursued a PhD specialising in early human habitation in South-East Asia supervised by Professor Pitcairn and the subject interested him greatly. Some seven years on, I had been lucky enough to be asked to head a team to research early hominid habitation in the Spice Islands. I knew from the start that Edward Pitcairn’s participation in the project could only enhance its status and its chances of conducting useful work, so I invited him to join the team. So, just a few years after the death of Professor Chupesi, he found himself back in the region and again in the field doing active research when we jointly initiated, with Indonesian government backing, the excavations on Sawu, work that continues to this day. In 1999, Edward had stated publicly that following the death of Professor Chupesi, he would no longer be carrying out field work and that he would dedicate his time to administration and teaching. We are all richer for the fact that he did not carry through his threat.

He did, certainly, spend several years concentrating on teaching, writing and administration. But it was in 2001 that Penny Pitcairn was diagnosed with cancer and Edward subsequently devoted himself to her care, a task that became more difficult and more time consuming over the following three years. In late 2003, he was granted a leave of absence from the university and Penny died in 2004.

Edward Pitcairn had responded to his wife’s death by re-dedicating more of his time to his research and fieldwork. In fact, practical archaeology became again for him almost an obsession. In his own estimation, digging holes in the ground allowed him to fill the void left by the passing of his wife.

He had become interested in widening his interest to the region as a whole largely because Professor Chupesi wanted to do the same. Her tragic death, coupled with his wife’s then on-going struggle with serious illness, thrust Edward into depression for a couple of years, during which time he refused to travel and announced his concentration on teaching. I take a certain amount of pride that, following my own graduation and his interest in my work, I was able, via projects initiated personally by me, to persuade Edward to return to the field. Over the following decade or more, it seemed that Edward learned to live again. He suddenly started to write again, and developed an almost single-minded devotion to his work, a devotion that at times demanded a little more than the utmost commitment of his colleagues.

Edward Pitcairn and I jointly managed the Sawu research for more than a decade. But it was not until three years into the project that the significance of our work began to become apparent. As the work progressed, Edward and I realised that our work on Sawu was beginning to create a new interpretation of the early hominid population of the region. Together we had rejected the obvious interpretation of our finds because they had simply not aligned with any pre-existing scheme. It took a further two years of intense excavation and analysis for us to conclude that we were certainly looking at another manifestation of the early dwarf hominids that had populated the region up to about fifty thousand years ago. And it was only in the last two years that we demonstrated definitively that the Sawu work suggested there had existed a completely new species of hominid. Edward Pitcairn’s lifetime of work thus reached its summit close to its end.

Edward Pitcairn is survived by his daughter, Gemma, and his granddaughter, Elsie, both of whom live in north London. Edward’s own legacy, however, will survive in his association with Australia and Indonesia, with Watulapitiyalu and Sawu, achievements that will forever be linked to his name.