Phil Harding

Phil still works as a field archaeologist with Wessex Archaeology, and has been involved in a project listing all known Palaeolithic sites in Britain. He has also completed a number of excavation reports – including some for Time Team – on sites ranging from the Palaeolithic to the Industrial Revolution. He continues to demonstrate flint-knapping at craft shows and to local societies.

Where did Phil get that hat? Find out here.

Audio files

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Phil talks about how he first got involved in Time Team and how he feels about the programme now.

'A nice piece of de-turfing, that one.' Phil talks about how much he enjoyed digging up the Richmond croquet lawn and some of his other favourite digs.

Phil Harding interview

Big grin and firm handshake
I arrived at Wessex Archaeology on a cold, wet and windy afternoon and was met by the big grin and firm handshake of Phil Harding. The plan was to go and record a section at a local quarry and also scan over some material that had previously offered up some fine Palaeolithic hand-axes, as part of a programme of work that Phil is undertaking. Phil showed me some of the examples that had come from the site before my visit: hand-axes of a comfortable weight and fine shape that felt as good to hold today as they must have done to the craftsmen that made them some 200,000 years before.

The quarry was fairly quiet as the majority of the first phases of extraction had been completed. After a quick natter with the quarrymen and the afternoon's field recording was done it was back to Phil's house for a brew and the interview. I began by asking him the obvious question of how he got started.

How Phil got started
'Mother used to work as a secretary in a farm office and they were having some archaeology work done on the farm. The farmer said to her "'Ere, your boy's interested in history, get him to come down", so I remember being bundled into the car and taken to the excavation. I can't remember exactly when I first became interested but back then it must have been enough for the farmer to have known. I must have been about eight years old.'

The next step was to get trained. 'I was at secondary school when a mate of mine gave me this flyer from Bristol University Extra Mural Department on a training excavation up on Fyfield and Overton Down. That was in '66. He said he didn't think he would bother but thought I might be interested in it. I had to go home cap in hand to Mother and Father asking them to cough up the notes because the training had to be paid for. I think it was about £20, which was like a king's ransom then. Anyway, after that I haven't missed a season's digging since. It was mostly in holidays and summers back then, until I started digging full time in 1971.'

'I blame the blues'
So what happened between '66 and '71? 'I blame the 12 bar blues for the demise of my academic career. To be honest, at the time when I should have been concentrating on my A levels something called the Blues Revival happened. A lot of people were into Clapton and the like, but some really good stuff called Delta Blues was coming out, stuff like Robert Johnson and Son House, to me that was a hell of a lot more exciting than A level Economics or whatever.'

Out of the puppet factory
So did you have a job? 'Can you believe it? I used to work in a puppet factory in Marlborough. We were living Collingbourne way and I used to hop on a bus to Marlborough and go and work in the factory. Then one holiday I was digging with a guy running a Southampton Unit excavation. I was troweling next to him and he said "You're going to come and dig with me in Southampton, aren't you?" I said, "I can't because I've got a job." So he said, "Well give up your job then." I went home and told my Mother that I was going to give up my prestigious job in the factory and of course the s**t hit the fan then, it went down like a lead balloon. Where's the future in that!'

Grimes Graves ...
Phil left his job and started working for the Southampton Unit. 'I was down there for about 18 months and then spotted an excavation in the CBA calendar, at Grimes Graves flint mines, run by the British Museum. I thought well, they're going to want doctors and nobs and high quality people for that – of course they took me like a shot. After a season at Grimes Graves I went back to Southampton for the winter. One of the good things with the large urban units was that they ran excavations all year round. Then by '73 it was a big time for the digging circuit and people moved around digging all over the place. During the seventies I was asked to go back to Grimes Graves and ended up doing the full five seasons there.

'Then I think it must have been around '74, when I was on the M3 project, I had a letter from one of my old supervisors, Chris Gingell, saying if I wanted to come back to my mother county of Wiltshire there was a job for me doing rural archaeology with the Department of Environment, based in Devizes. We had several years working on the Marlborough Downs and then similar parts of the DoE based in Berkshire, Hampshire, Dorset and the Isle of Wight. All combined in Salisbury to become Wessex Archaeology, and I've been here ever since.'

... and Time Team
And Time Team? 'My involvement in that started when I was asked to do flint knapping for the Time Signs programme and it went on from there. I think some of the best bits have been meeting a lot of good people and also getting to work with some very talented craftsmen and craftswomen.'

I asked Phil if he would ever think of leaving Wiltshire. 'I don't see the point really. I have my own house here, I'm about seven minutes from the best pub in Christendom, the Wyndham Arms, and rampant capitalism has got me as I'm a shareholder in the Hop Back Brewery.'

Finally, one of the most intriguing things about excavation can be graves and grave goods. We often try to work out things about an individual by the artefacts that accompany them. I asked Phil what he would like to be buried with and what he thought they would say about him. 'I think I would probably want a flint and a hammer so that people would know I was a flint knapper. I suppose my trowel because I'm an archaeologist first and foremost. And I had better have something to put my beer in.'

Phil Harding answers some of our questions

Why I love Phil Harding by Pete May

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