‘The Coup’: How Did the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia Become the Prehistoric Society?

Abstract

One of Piggott's Young Turks, C.W. Phillips (1987, 48), wrote in his autobiography, ‘By 1935, I was to be part-author of a revolution in the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia and become Hon. Secretary of the national Prehistoric Society conjured from its ashes.’To this day, the transition of the regional Prehistoric Society of East Anglia to the national Prehistoric Society is remembered as a well planned coup. The story of an abrupt and resisted occupation of this key institution stands vividly in collective archaeological memory. In a recent interview, Thurstan Shaw, who took a First in the Cambridge Archaeology and Anthropology Tripos in 1936, clearly remembered his very young teacher, Grahame Clark, ‘referring to the take-over with considerable satisfaction’ (Shaw, in conversation with the author, 1996). Another of Clark's students, Jack Golson, who graduated in '51, maintains that Phillips, Clark, Hawkes, and Piggott took the Society out of an ‘East Anglia frame to a national level … They stacked it!’ (Golson, in conversation with the author, 1996).