Lawrence Harry Barfield

Our Fellow Lawrence Barfield died on 2 July 2009 after a twenty-one-month battle with Mesothelioma, a cancer caused by exposure to asbestos. We are very grateful to our Fellow Mark Pearce for the following obituary, an edited version of which was published in The Times on 29 July 2009. Further tributes by Mark and others can be read on the ‘In Memoriam’ page of the Antiquity website.

Lawrence Barfield was best known as a specialist on Neolithic and Copper Age northern Italy, but his interests ranged from palaeoindian lithics of the Atacama desert in Chile, via a fortified imperial villa in the German Rhineland to the Roman salt industry at Droitwich (Worcestershire, England). Indeed he was very active in English prehistory, particularly that of the West Midlands, with a special interest in the interpretation of burnt stones and burnt mounds, which he proposed might be prehistoric saunas.

Lawrence Barfield was born in Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire, in 1935 and died in Birmingham on 2 July 2009 after a 21 month battle with Mesothelioma, a cancer caused by exposure to asbestos. He studied at the Universities of Cambridge, Ljubljana and Pavia and worked at the University of Bonn and the Rheinisches Landesmuseum before taking up a post at the University of Birmingham in 1966, where he remained until retiring as Reader in 2000.

Lawrence Barfield got into archaeology whilst at Merchant Taylors’ school, when he and Martin Biddle excavated the Manor of the More, Cardinal Wolsey’s palace, which was at the edge of the school grounds. Whilst on National Service he dug a test pit at Ezion-geber and surveyed in the Libyan desert near Tarhuna. In 1955 he went up to Magdalene College, Cambridge, to read Archaeology and Anthropology where he decided to specialise in prehistoric archaeology. On graduating he began a PhD on the Neolithic of northern Italy and the Balkans, spending a year at the University of Ljubljana as a British Council exchange student, later deciding to focus on the north Italian Neolithic. He then spent about a year as an exchange student at the Collegio Borromeo, at the University of Pavia, after which he was offered a post as Assistent in the Department of Vor-und Frühgeschichte at the University of Bonn.

It was while he was in Bonn that he began digging at the Rocca di Rivoli, an important Neolithic site near Verona. Lawrence stayed in Bonn for three and a half years, moving from the University to the Landesmuseum where he conducted a number of excavations, dating from the Bronze Age to Roman. After finishing his PhD at Cambridge he became a lecturer at the University of Birmingham in 1966.

Lawrence Barfield made a number of groundbreaking contributions to north Italian prehistory. As well as his excavations at Rocca di Rivoli, where he established a chronology for the Square-mouthed pottery culture, he also excavated at Fimon, Molino Casarotto, a Neolithic site; at Monte Covolo, which has a sequence from the late Neolithic to the middle Bronze Age; at the Riparo Valtenesi, Manerba, a major copper age cemetery in a rock shelter with collective burials in wooden chambers; at Ponte di Veia, a flint production site; and at the Rocca di Manerba.

In 1971 he published a seminal work, Northern Italy before Rome, in Thames & Hudson’s ‘Ancient Peoples and Places’ series, which provided the first proper synthesis of north Italian prehistory. Other major contributions included his recognition of the Monti Lessini near Verona as the principal source of high grade flint in prehistoric north Italy, and his 1994 Antiquity paper on the Iceman, pointing out that it firmly dated the beginning of the Italian Copper Age to the fourth millennium BC. On the same topic he co-authored Der Zeuge aus dem Gletscher: Das Rätsel der frühen Alpen-Europäer with E. Koller and A. Lippert (Vienna: Ueberreuter, 1992). A 1997 paper with Chris Chippindale in Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society proposed a novel interpretation of the rock art of Mont Bego, suggesting that the prestige goods depicted might be part of an initiation rite for young men. His Excavations in the Riparo Valtenesi, Manerba, 1976-1994 (Origines. Florence: Istituto Italiano di Preistoria e Protostoria) was published in 2007.

An interview with Lawrence Barfield and a list of publications will be published in the next issue of Accordia Research Papers. He is survived by his wife, Marylane, and two children, Sebastian and Abigail.