A titan in world archaeology, Colin Renfrew, Lord Renfrew of Kaimsthorn, who has died aged 87, tackled questions key to understanding who we are – what makes us human, how migration changes culture, why civilisations appear, what art means – with new evidence as well as argument. His determination to address big issues with science and data fired his enthusiastic embrace of new ideas and technologies, and his joy in directing excavations.
Renfrew entered archaeology in the 1960s at a time of profound change. Younger practitioners were discovering the promise of new sciences and computers, and questioning accepted ideas about prehistory and how to tell its stories. Statistics replaced intuition, in what became known internationally as the New Archaeology, with Renfrew a UK figurehead and Lewis Binford, his friend and sparring partner in disruption, in the US.
Renfrew announced his arrival in 1968 with the paper Wessex Without Mycenae, published in the Annual of the British School at Athens. Using then controversial radiocarbon dating, he challenged long-held assumptions about the rise of early civilisation. Archaeologists had assumed innovations in northern Europe had been adopted from the south, allowing the former to be dated by inferred links to calendars in the eastern Mediterranean. With forensic perception, Renfrew realised that the new dates showed that people in the north must have engineered their own achievements – among them Stonehenge, seen to be older than its supposed Greek designers. As Renfrew saw, breaking the links opened the field to new ideas about how changes occurred.
Not all were ready to accept his case, but he developed the theme in his first book, The Emergence of Civilisation: The Cyclades and the Aegean in the Third Millennium BC (1972), which, like the earlier paper, was turned down by his original choice of publisher. Drawing on his University of Cambridge doctoral thesis, in a tour de force that many consider remains the best of his 60 books (including those he edited and co-authored), he set out a theory of how societies change. He then applied the model, with striking insight, to the appearance in the bronze age of palace economies in Crete and mainland Greece.
Carbon dating led to a call from the BBC, and in 1971 the first of several films for the Chronicle series, The Tree That Put the Clock Back, in which Renfrew expounded on ancient peoples in distant locations. Documentaries then were not afraid to challenge viewers, and Renfrew, in raincoat and cloth cap, rose to the occasion, frequently inspired by the experience to conduct new research.
Visiting Orkney in 1971 for the first time with the presenter Magnus Magnusson, who became a close friend, he decided to excavate a neolithic burial mound there. He thought Stonehenge might be explained as the creation of chiefdom societies, wrote another controversial paper (now brushing off critical anthropologists as well as archaeologists) and went filming in Easter Island and Tonga like an excited child with new toys – but, as always, with a mature determination to use them in his grand venture to fathom humanity.
His first academic post was as a lecturer in prehistory and archaeology at the University of Sheffield (1965–72). In 1968 he stood as a Conservative candidate in Sheffield Brightside, substantially reducing the Labour majority. Offered a safe Conservative seat at a future election, he realised he would have to give up archaeology, and declined. He moved in 1972 as professor of archaeology to the University of Southampton, where he was instrumental in setting up the Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG), a free-thinking conference for staff and students that still meets annually at universities across the UK.
Renowned as an inspiring and demanding teacher, and honoured by his peers (he was a fellow of both the Society of Antiquaries of London and of Scotland, and of the British Academy), in 1981 he was elected Disney professor of archaeology at the University of Cambridge. He wrote Archaeology and Language (1987), arguing that Indo-European languages were spread by expanding populations of the first farmers, a controversial theory he came to abandon – characteristically standing down in the face of new evidence – in favour of more recent horse-empowered migrations. With Paul Bahn he co-authored the standard textbook Archaeology (1991, now in its ninth edition). And he embarked on a new project: active engagement with contemporary art.
Renfrew’s enthusiasm had begun in his teens with visits to a friend of his parents, Ted Power, whose exceptional collection of modern art ranged from Brancusi to Barnett Newman and Jackson Pollock; he later reviewed art for Varsity, the Cambridge student paper. In 1986 he was invited to be master of Jesus College, Cambridge, an office he held for 11 years. Filling the master’s lodge with his own growing collection, he founded the Sculpture in the Close exhibition series, which opened with Richard Long digging up the lawn. Renfrew became friends with many featured artists, who also included the Chapman brothers, Mark Dion, Barry Flanagan, Antony Gormley and Cornelia Parker, and he sought to reconcile his emotive response to art with his intellectual concern for the past.
In his book Figuring It Out (2003), he argued, not always convincingly, that artists and archaeologists were on parallel quests to understand the nature of being human. Gormley and the writer Ben Okri were among the 40 people who spoke at his 80th birthday celebration.
In 1990 he became founding director of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, a focus for science and fieldwork. Daniel McClean McDonald, an industrialist, had approached him with a proposal that led to a new building and an endowment for research and running costs, funded by one of the largest gifts of its kind received by Cambridge University.
The following year Renfrew was offered a life peerage by John Major, then the prime minister, which he accepted only after being persuaded by Ken Clarke, a friend since student days and then education minister, that attending the House of Lords one day a week would be enough. The politician Tim Loughton, a former student of his, with whom Renfrew co-chaired the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) on archaeology, considered him an example of the best of the Lords, someone at the top of their game contributing to academic and heritage policy at a high level; Renfrew also co-chaired an effective APPG for the protection of cultural heritage. He left the Lords in 2021, having retired from the Disney chair in 2004.
An only child, Renfrew was born in Stockton-on-Tees and shortly afterwards moved with his parents, Helena (nee Savage) and Archibald, to Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, where his father worked at ICI Plastics. His parents encouraged his interest in art and history, taking him to museums in Paris and Rome and to see megaliths in Spain, and he went to St Albans school on a scholarship.
He did national service in Germany before gaining a first-class degree in archaeology and anthropology at St John’s College, Cambridge (1962), having spent his first year studying natural sciences. As president of the Cambridge Union, he surprised fellow students by successfully inviting Lord Reith to speak.
He co-directed excavations at Quanterness, Orkney (1972–74), and, in Greece, Saliagos (1964-65), Sitagroi (1968-70), Phylakopi (1974–77), and a long-running project on the Cycladic island of Keros. Keros had suffered extensive looting of small marble figurines redolent of works by Brancusi and Modigliani. The archaeologists decided the tiny island had been a central place for the Cyclades where around 2500BC people brought the broken carvings for ritual burial; a common theme of his excavations was resolving ways to identify and characterise shrines and religious behaviour.
After publication of his book featuring a private collection of figurines, The Cycladic Spirit (1991), it emerged that many were looted, and he began his work countering the illicit antiquities trade, which he said damaged ancient sites and tainted artefacts, rendering both valueless. He was scathing of those museums and private collectors in Europe and North America whom, he charged, ignored the effects of their acquisitiveness on countries unable to protect their heritage, publishing an angry polemic, Loot, Legitimacy and Ownership, in 2000.
He received many honours for his outstanding contributions to archaeology, including the Archaeological Institute of America’s Bandelier award, the International Balzan prize and the European Science Foundation Latsis prize. He held many committee posts, among them as a trustee of the British Museum and a commissioner for English Heritage.
He is survived by his wife, Jane (nee Ewbank), an archaeologist and botanist, whom he married in 1965, and their children, Helena, Alban and Magnus.
• Andrew Colin Renfrew, Lord Renfrew of Kaimsthorn, archaeologist, born 25 July 1937; died 24 November 2024
