Christopher Yates Tilley [11 September 1955 –10 March 2024]
My first meeting with Chris was in about 1980 at a Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG) meeting in Cambridge. I was there out of curiosity, to know more about what was buzzing at the time, as a new paradigm emerging from a group of firebrand young archaeologists who had upended the established figures of the scientifically oriented New Archaeology with inspirational references to structuralism and post-structuralism and anthropology as the right source of theoretical analogues.
There I met Chris Tilley, this rather wild-looking guy, who also spoke to me about synthesising structuralism and Marxism, and was already saying the best route was through phenomenology. He then moved to a post in the University of Wales at Lampeter and together with Mike Shanks, set up a new department of experimental archaeology. They went on to write two books together that came to be known as the red and black books for the reconstruction of archaeology.
Ten years later Chris moved to a joint appointment in Anthropology and Archaeology at University College London (UCL), which we had negotiated with the late David Harris, then Director of the Institute of Archaeology. He came to teach the first joint undergraduate degree in Anthropology and Archaeology in the UK, which is now one of our most successful and popular courses. For various reasons of the academic/political kind, Chris's post evolved into a full post in anthropology. I think he really did see the broad four-field style of UCL Anthropology as a natural home for his own research as he un-problematically moved back and forth from prehistory to contemporary material culture, drawing inspirations from both. For him, everything was material culture, and you found it everywhere and at any time.
If I describe Chris pursuing a sort of zigzagging academic career of creative potential – I think he would have seen this as a quite positive outcome of a personal history in which he quite liked to imagine himself as being a bit of a maverick – the boy, he once told me ironically, who failed his 11-plus yet got into Cambridge.
His friend and collaborator Wayne Bennett has given us a vivid picture of how challenging it could be to work with Chris on their many shared projects. I am sure many others had some experience of how working with Chris could be challenging. I once sent him a draft of a chapter for his book on London's Urban Landscape: Another Way of Telling (UCL Press, 2019). I got it sent back tartly with a rejection – it was no good – there was nothing about walking in it. But being challenging did mean that nobody knew what he would come up with next. On my last visit to him in hospital in Brighton – when, to put it mildly, he was in pretty dire straits – as I turned to leave him in the ICU, his last barely audible words were to remind me that the next time I came I should bring down Elizabeth Shee Twowig's book The Megalithic Art of Western Europe (Clarendon Press, 1981). Research was everything for him, and I was being sent off to get the materials together for a new idea about writing the prehistory of Britain in a hundred objects. I still have Twowig's book out of the library. For me, Chris was that rare example of a total passion for a “life of the mind”. A passion for the intellect.
Everyone who knew him will have their own personal memories of Chis Tilley that will live on. But I want to emphasise what I think are, in a profound way, his achievements for which we owe him so much. There is a “shelf of books” from Chris – whilst he would be the last to say “this is me”, instead we would say, this is him. His writing and research over forty years were pivotal for founding the international reputation of Material Culture as a core part of modern anthropology. His time was a golden age of Material Culture Studies at UCL and his thinking and writing inspired and helped to realise the careers of an incredibly wide network of friends and colleagues. He was never interested in nor received large grants or honours. So, it is his books and the memories of those influenced by him that his reputation as thinker and scholar will rest and thrive.
In Anthropology, we all knew that Chris was the finest teacher in the Department. C81 Material Culture & Social Theory was, for years, the course that stood out in student reviews. Without notes or PowerPoints, Chris would enthuse students and communicate complex ideas with amazing clarity. In lectures on his landscape course, he quite literally could upend people's certainty about what they thought they were doing in research and take them off in entirely new directions.
Although there are many who would have their own appreciation of Chris (and we hope to have a meeting to allow for this), I received two tributes a few days before his funeral in Brighton that I feel I should convey here. Both were his former PhD students, now in academic positions in Greece.
Eleana Yalouri (Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, Princeton University)
Τhere are some people who, when they are gone, leave one feeling as if an anchor of their personal development has been unmoored. I certainly feel that way about Chris Tilley and so do, I am sure, all those who had the privilege to call themselves his students. For Chris was one of those teachers who shaped their students without necessarily being aware of the enormous influence he exerted on them. In his small office at Torrington Place, he magically untangled the most confused thoughts of students he mentored and, in his classes, he made the most complex theory accessible through his lucid thought and clarity of language.
No wonder his lectures were unfailingly popular and crowded. With an incomparable calmness, he delivered sharp critical comments and came up with groundbreaking thoughts. His hushed and untroubled serenity was infectious and made the places where he taught and/or conversed with others feel almost like meditation spaces. I only saw him stressed once, a few days before his inaugural lecture, when he anxiously asked if he really had to wear a suit on the day.
Even though he was one of the towering figures who laid the ground for the reshaping of archaeology in the 1980s and established its bond with sociocultural anthropology, he remained humble, unpretentious, shy even, whilst he let his inner world shine in his writings and especially in those sections where this is customarily allowed: in the dedications and acknowledgements of his works. Characteristically for Chris, they express so much, in so few words, about his groundedness: in the soil, the landscape, family, life, love, and loss. Something that today we probably all wish we could express with the lucidity and the power Chris had over language.
Chris, you have made a difference in this world. May you find a garden, the most beautiful of all you studied, to rest your soul in peace.
Esther Solomon (University of Ioannina)
As a master's student, I remember myself spending days and nights reading passages from Reconstructing Archaeology (Cambridge, 1987) by Chris Tilley and Michael Shanks. For a Greek archaeology student in the 1990s, this combination of social theory and the study of objects dated in all periods of human activity was a kind of poetry, a magic surprise that followed me until the day I courageously decided to email and ask him to supervise my PhD. And then a great period started in the basement of the UCL Anthropology Department, where the hero of my student life had his anti-heroic office. Our collaboration was constant, smooth, full of tenderness, sincere words, and essential communication.
I moved to Crete where I discovered the fascinating world of the Minoan antiquities and their relation to the modern culture of the island. Chris was with me in this ethnographic journey every single day – he enjoyed this immersion into the largely unknown places his students were doing fieldwork under his supervision. He nourished my passion until the end: the viva, the changes I was asked to do, and also when I became mother and a university professor, when he read and supported my book Contested Antiquity (2021), which had remained stuck at Indiana University Press for years.
In 2017, when Eleana Yalouri, his first Greek student and great friend, invited him to Athens for a conference she was organising, Chris returned, after 40 years, to Greece. Those days were so special. Then, in the corridor of a nice tavern where we were having lunch in the centre of Athens, I felt once again how lucky I was to have known this person who could always inspire me through his words, either written or said in person.
Yet I would like to finish these lines with something else: the unexpected feeling of Chris's shyness – his shy smile always encouraged me to be less shy. At some point, perhaps in 2003, I explained to him that a hug and a kiss on each cheek is a proper way in Greece to express deep feelings of love, appreciation, and affection, and so Chris laughed every time we said goodbye. It is in such a way that I would now say farewell to someone who changed my life so much.
Coda: Patrick Laviolette (Masaryk University)
Often after seminars at five o'clock or so, a group of UCL staff and students find themselves in the Senior Common Room of the North Cloisters. The Marlborough Arms across the road from Malet Place is another favourite hangout. Many of those people will have fond memories of Chris Tilley ordering a pint (most often bitter, real ale, or IPA). There would often be a sly knowing smile on his lips when we bought ourselves rounds: “What are you having, Chris, Directors or Pedigree?” For those who were familiar with his study about the semiotics of beer cans, “you are what you drink” took on a special meaning – frequently invoking an almost juvenile giggle.
After years of research in the Southwest of Britain, Cornish beer brands such as Doom Bar, Proper Job, and Tribute added themselves to the list of social lubricants. For some colleagues this was especially needed when Chris was around because the discussion frequently involved an intense process of language learning. And not always in terms of verbal utterances, although his slow, calm voice was a steadying influence on nervous young whippersnappers. Indeed, his work in the areas of hermeneutics, phenomenology, and material metaphor strove to resolve the tensions between textual and haptic knowledge, the sayable and the unspoken, the aesthetic, applicable, cognitive, and moral.
Christopher Tilley was an only child who, from a young age, was raised by his grandmother and mum in Weston-Super-Mare – a coastal town in North Somerset. Upon winning a scholarship to the University of Cambridge, he attended Peterhouse College, where he pretty much stayed for over a decade, from 1974 to 1987. His PhD thesis was supervised by Ian Hodder, the examiners being Colin Renfrew and Mike Rowlands. During his studies, he fell under the influence of David Clarke and began a set of collaborations, principally with Daniel Miller and Michael Shanks. The cohort of people that gathered around Clarke and Hodder were behind the “revolutionary” establishment of post-processual archaeology, of which Chris was often seen as one of the more extreme proponents.
His main field research dealt with Swedish rock art and after several years of ferocious reading in cultural theory, the scene was set for a number of cutting-edge publications. Later in his career, he turned towards doing fieldwork in the UK, with a particular interest in allotment gardening. Along with Barbara Bender and Sue Hamilton, he directed the Leskernick Landscape Project on Bodmin Moor. This was a five-year endeavour funded by the British Academy. The cover of this issue of EE was taken in the last year of that interdisciplinary examination of a prehistoric Bronze Age settlement in Cornwall – and it allowed for my own initiation into truly immersive ethnographic fieldwork. A few years later, Chris led the four-year East Devon Pebblebeds Project and, sometime after that, was involved with a re-examination of Stonehenge that included such people as Mike Parker Pearson, Joshua Pollard, Colin Richards, Julian Thomas, and Kate Welham.
Even those of us who had much affection for him would admit that Chris had many eccentric personality features, not uncommon for brilliant scholars. For one, he had a fairly intense dislike for the increasing emphasis on audit-culture within academic institutions. Nor was he especially at ease in large social settings. During his eloquently delivered lectures, he would only rarely catch the eye of his students. He admitted to me once that his technique for recalling almost verbatim large portions of complex text was to place his ideas around familiar landscapes and thus to navigate through the terrain along a path that suited the topic of the day. Despite such an unassuming timidity, he always had astute, sometimes cutting questions at seminars. He would thrive, however, in small groups and one-on-one scenarios, when he loved to talk art, politics, gardening, and social theory. I chose him as my PhD supervisor because he had no qualms about pushing people to the point of discomfort in order to help them learn how to think as deeply as possible.
Chris was a prolific author, even more so it would seem in the past few years. UCL Press published in 2017 an Open Access book he wrote with one of his MA students, Kate Cameron-Daum, which I had the pleasure of peer-reviewing before publication. The book is about the contested uses of landscape in the Southwest of England. The only real critique that I had was that they had not contextualised the volume into any discussion regarding the Anthropology of Britain. When I met with him a few weeks after the book had been released, he started “lecturing” me on how such an anthropology does not exist. How we got to that topic, I cannot quite remember, but it did not take long before I had to ask, “So you've worked out that I was the one who reviewed your recent book?” He looked at me with what seemed like genuine surprise and then denied having guessed. But I wonder, since he had listed me in the proposal alongside Steven Feld and Eric Hirsch. So, needless to say, I had agreed to review the work out of being flattered.
Photo: Chris Tilley, photo courtesy Alice and Benjamin Tilley.
Citation: Ethnologia Europaea 54, 1; 10.3167/ee.2024.540106
Not long after this, in 2019, Chris edited a compilation of essays entitled London's Urban Landscape (Open Access series of UCL Press). Many of the contributions are by his supervisees. In addition to the anthology's comprehensive introduction, he also wrote a lengthy chapter about Holland Park. This was a little more than a stone's throw from his “home away from home” in the capital. At least it was for many years, since there is a sense in this essay that he did not quite feel that Notting Hill was where his heart was. Indeed, in his astute Marxist critique of corporate neoliberalism, one might even imagine that he was rather disgusted by the veneer of nature that the park purports to convey under the guise of a green metropolitan oasis.
At least that is how I read what appears to be one of his most autobiographical texts. Now there is much to admire in both the prose of the piece as well as the merging of interview data with socio-material analysis and fieldwork photographs. In terms of the latter, my favourite is a staged picture of him “interviewing” a man of roughly the same height. This unknown stranger is of a rather larger build and appears to be a labourer, maybe a park groundsman? This painted bronze statue was made in 1998 and is called Walking Man. It is the work of artist Sean Henry. The symmetry of the image has more to do with the similarities between Henry and Tilley – artist/ethnographer – than between author/interrogator and subject matter, though there are some quite obvious shared features. Sean Henry's polychromatic labourer, set in Britain's sprawling urban capital, will now always remind me of the juxtaposition of Chris's down to earth character alongside his sheer intellectual brilliance.
Walking Man (1998). Sculpture by Sean Henry in Holland Park, Kensington. Photo: Chris Tilley, non-human fieldwork, from London's Urban Landscape (UCL Press, 2019).
Citation: Ethnologia Europaea 54, 1; 10.3167/ee.2024.540106
