Colin Renfrew obituary: archaeologist who shifted thinking on how societies evolve

He brought cutting-edge methods to archaeological analysis, helping to reshape the field

Colin Renfrew played a key part in transforming archaeology into a problem-oriented, theoretically explicit and scientifically informed field during the last third of the twentieth century. Although his fieldwork concentrated mainly on the prehistory of two island groups close to his heart — the Cyclades in Greece and Orkney in Scotland — his interpretive reach and influence were global, making him archaeology’s closest approximation to a household name. He has died aged 87.

Renfrew was born in the English town of Stockton-on-Tees. He added an informed engagement with science (his father worked as a chemist) to his youthful passion for antiquity. He initially chose to study natural sciences at the University of Cambridge, UK, but soon switched to archaeology and anthropology. In 1965, he completed his PhD, which shed new light on the early Cyclades, and then began a lectureship at the University of Sheffield, UK.

There, Renfrew found himself well placed to exploit the archaeological opportunities of scientific advances. For example, that year, he collaborated with geologists, using trace elemental analysis to discriminate between Aegean sources of the volcanic glass obsidian, used to make cutting tools. Eventually this investigation would confirm that 12,000-year-old finds of obsidian from Franchthi Cave in southern Greece were derived from the Cycladic island that is now called Milos — at the time, marking the earliest proven sea-crossing in the world.

Renfrew’s thinking was further inspired by a stay in California during 1967. It was a time of exciting developments in ‘new archaeological’ theory in the United States, which emphasized rigorous scientific, quantitative and anthropological approaches to understand the dynamics of past societies. And it had just been discovered that tree-ring sequences from the long-lived bristlecone pines (Pinus longaeva), found in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, offered the means to calibrate radiocarbon dates, making it possible to push chronologies back centuries earlier than previously expected.

Prompted by these developments, Renfrew re-examined the accepted inter-relations between prehistoric developments in Europe and Near Eastern civilizations, offering new models for how societies change. Until the 1960s, most archaeologists had explained large-scale cultural change through ‘diffusion’ of people and ideas over time from core areas — in particular Egypt and Mesopotamia. But Renfrew quickly realized that calibrated radiocarbon dating challenged this perspective.

As he pointed out, building of the megalithic temples of Malta began before the pyramids of Egypt, and the rich Bronze Age burials in southern Britain were as ancient as those of ‘golden’ Mycenae in Greece. His early masterpiece, a book called The Emergence of Civilisation (1972), advocated a radically new way of viewing change and growth, not as a consequence of external stimuli but rather as a result of interactive, mutually reinforcing internal processes such as agricultural intensification, technological change, increased trade and ideational shifts in a society.