Timothy W. Potter

Timothy W. Potter
Born	Timothy William Potter (1944-07-06)6 July 1944
Died	11 January 2000(2000-01-11) (aged 55)
Alma mater	Trinity College, Cambridge
Known for	South Etruria Survey; The Changing Landscape of South Etruria; the Thetford Treasure; excavations at Stonea
Spouse	Sandra Caroline Bailey (m. 1985)
Children	2
Scientific career
Fields	Archaeology
Workplaces	Lancaster University British Museum British School at Rome
Thesis	The Archaeological Topography of the Central and Southern Ager Faliscus  (1974)

Timothy William Potter, FSA (6 July 1944 – 11 January 2000) was a British archaeologist who specialised in the archaeology of Roman Italy and Roman Britain and was one of the most productive British practitioners of landscape archaeology of his generation. For the last two decades of his life he was a curator at the British Museum, where he became Keeper of the Department of Prehistoric and Romano-British Antiquities in 1995. He is best remembered for his synthesis The Changing Landscape of South Etruria (1979); for his excavations at Narce and the Mola di Monte Gelato in Italy and at Stonea in the Cambridgeshire Fens; for his joint publication of the Thetford Treasure with Catherine Johns; and for his part in creating the British Museum's Weston Gallery of Roman Britain. He served as President of the Royal Archaeological Institute from 1999 until his death.

Family and early life

Potter was born on 6 July 1944, the younger son of Cedric Hardcastle Potter and Phyllis Potter (née Rendall). He came from a family of schoolmasters: his father was for many years headmaster of March Grammar School, near Ely in the Cambridgeshire Fens, and was himself the son of a headmaster, William Potter of the Roan School at Greenwich. According to Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Potter's clipped, old-fashioned accent gave a misleading impression of Establishment origins; the discipline and organisation came from his father, while the warmth came from his mother, whom he adored.

He grew up in the shadow of an elder brother, Christopher, five years his senior, a classical scholar who also became a headmaster. It was Christopher who introduced Tim to archaeology: as a schoolboy he dug on his brother's excavations in the Fens, above all the Romano-British village of Grandford, March (worked 1958–64), where he acquired the practical field skills that underpinned his career. At school he took distinctions in all three of his A-levels (English, History and Archaeology), and a school essay on the Roman Fenland, drawing on his own fieldwork, contributed to the Royal Geographical Society survey published as The Fenland in Roman Times (1970).

Education

In 1963 Potter won a place at Trinity College, Cambridge, intending to read history, but soon transferred to archaeology and anthropology. He took a first in Part I (with promotion to a college Exhibition), a first in the preliminary examination to Part II (with a Senior Scholarship), and a first in Part II. He was already publishing as an undergraduate, with a note on a third-century coin hoard from Coldham (1963) and a study of the Roman pottery from Coldham Clamp (1965); this Fenland work laid the foundations for his later excavation and publication of Stonea. He was awarded a Cambridge PhD in 1974 for a thesis on the archaeological topography of the Ager Faliscus, and was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1980.

Rome and early career

Applying for a Rome Scholarship before his finals in 1966, Potter received glowing references from Joan Liversidge and Brian Hope-Taylor, who praised both his fieldwork and his good humour under hard conditions. He held the Rome Scholarship in Classical Studies at the British School at Rome from 1966 to 1968. He arrived with neither a fixed research topic nor any Italian, but mastered both. He had come to work with the School's director, John Bryan Ward-Perkins, who assigned him the Ager Faliscus as his part of the long-running South Etruria Survey. Their relationship was initially wary, but Ward-Perkins became the figure on whom Potter in many ways modelled himself.

In 1969–70 Potter took a temporary teaching post at the University of California, Santa Cruz, arriving during the campus unrest of the period; the experience repelled him. He returned to Rome on an Ellaina Macnamara Memorial Fellowship (1971–72) and drafted his Narce publication while holding a Sir James Knott Fellowship at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne (1972–73). In 1973 he took his first permanent post, as Lecturer in Archaeology in the Department of Classics and Archaeology at the University of Lancaster, where he remained until 1978 and helped build a new archaeology programme.

Work in Italy

Narce and the South Etruria Survey

Potter's excavation at Narce (1966–71) became a demonstration of stratigraphic method; a flash flood had cut a section through a rich sequence running from the Bronze Age to the Roman period. The results appeared as A Faliscan Town in South Etruria: Excavations at Narce 1966–71 (1976). Colleagues long remembered the good humour with which he ran the dig, and in particular his habit of appearing late from his caravan in a silk dressing-gown, a chilled beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other, after the rest of the team had already started work.

His most widely read book grew directly out of the South Etruria Survey. The Changing Landscape of South Etruria (1979) synthesised two decades of Ward-Perkins's fieldwork into a single narrative of shifting settlement, illustrated by a celebrated series of distribution maps; it became a landmark of landscape archaeology and appeared in an Italian edition in 1985. Potter himself later judged that some of his pottery datings had been over-confident, a recognition that helped drive the later Tiber Valley Project.

Monte Gelato and later Italian fieldwork

His other Italian projects included the medieval village of Mazzano Romano (1971), the Republican sanctuary at Ponte di Nona (1975–76), and the early-medieval castle site of Ponte Nepesino (1982). From 1986 to 1990, with post-excavation work in 1991, he directed the excavation of the Mola di Monte Gelato in the Ager Faliscus, with financial backing from the British Museum. The dig was designed to test, by stratigraphic excavation, the chronological patterns suggested by surface survey—specifically a hypothesis of early incastellamento in the sixth to eighth centuries. The results refuted it, revealing a castellated settlement formed only in the eleventh century and pointing to discontinuity rather than continuity between late Roman and early-medieval times. The findings appeared as Excavations at the Mola di Monte Gelato (1997).

Potter also wrote the synthesis Roman Italy (1987) for the British Museum's Exploring the Roman World series, and in the 1990s became the inspiration and chair of the British School at Rome's Tiber Valley Project.

Work in North Africa

While at Lancaster, Potter began excavating at Iol Caesarea (Cherchel) in Algeria (1977–81), with Nacera Benseddik. Publication was long delayed by the Algerian authorities, and the final report, Fouilles du Forum de Cherchel, did not appear until 1993. His related synthesis Towns in Late Antiquity: Iol Caesarea and its Context appeared in 1995. A 1982 project at Lambaesis was subsequently taken over by S. P. Roskams.

The British Museum and Roman Britain

In 1978 Potter left Lancaster for the British Museum's Department of Prehistoric and Romano-British Antiquities, where he remained for the rest of his life. He was Assistant Keeper from 1978 to 1989, Deputy Keeper from 1989 to 1995, and Keeper from 1995 until his death in 2000.

The Fens and Stonea

Potter continued the Fenland research he had begun as a schoolboy, directing excavations at Stonea, Cambridgeshire (1980–85), which included an unusual Roman stone tower-building at Stonea Grange. His paper "The Roman Occupation of the Central Fenland" (Britannia, 1981) and the monograph Excavations at Stonea, Cambridgeshire 1980–85 (with R. P. J. Jackson, 1996) were regarded by his colleagues as among his greatest achievements.

The Thetford and Hoxne treasures and the Weston Gallery

With Catherine Johns, Potter published The Thetford Treasure: Roman Jewellery and Silver (1983), a late-fourth-century hoard of gold jewellery and silver spoons found near Thetford, Norfolk; the find drew substantial regional press coverage when it was declared treasure trove and displayed. The pair also wrote the Roman Britain volume in the Exploring the Roman World series (1992).

Potter was closely involved with the Hoxne Hoard, the largest late-Roman treasure found in Britain, discovered in Suffolk in November 1992 while he was Deputy Keeper. His enthusiasm for the find helped secure the support of the Weston family's foundation, which funded the British Museum's new Weston Gallery of Roman Britain, opened in 1997.

British fieldwork

Earlier in his career Potter directed a sequence of British excavations: the Iron Age oppidum and Romano-British town at Braughing (Puckeridge) on Ermine Street (1971–72), at which he held public open days; the Roman forts of Cumbria—Watercrook near Kendal (1974–75), Ravenglass (1976–78) and Bowness-on-Solway (1973, 1976)—together with the Biglands milefortlet, work that refined understanding of the Hadrianic Cumberland-coast frontier defences, published as Romans in North-West England (1979); the early Christian chapel and cemetery at Heysham, Lancashire (1977–78); and the collapsed fourth-century building façade from Meonstoke, Hampshire (1989).

Honours and offices

• Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London (FSA), 1980.
• Member, Faculty of Archaeology, History and Letters, British School at Rome, 1975–79 and 1989–91; Chairman, 1991–96.
• President, Royal Archaeological Institute, 1999 until his death in January 2000 (succeeded by Mark W. Hassall).
• Trustee, Roman Research Trust, from 1998.

Personal life

Potter met Sandra Caroline Bailey in 1984 and married her in 1985; they had a son, Simon, and a daughter, Belinda. He was a noted enthusiast for good food—the notebooks in which he logged mileage and fuel consumption on his digs also rated each evening's dinner. His listed recreations were listening to cricket commentary and drawing.

Death and legacy

Potter died suddenly on 11 January 2000, aged 55, his career cut short prematurely. Obituaries appeared in The Daily Telegraph (26 January 2000), the Papers of the British School at Rome (by Andrew Wallace-Hadrill), the American Journal of Archaeology (by Stephen L. Dyson), the Journal of Roman Archaeology (by Catherine Johns), and Archeologia Medievale (by Federico Marazzi).

Assessments stress not the origination of new theory but the clarity, energy and productivity of his synthesis, his near-unbroken record of bringing his excavations to publication, and the generosity with which he encouraged younger scholars.

Selected publications

• A Faliscan Town in South Etruria: Excavations at Narce 1966–71 (British School at Rome, 1976)
• Romans in North-West England: Excavations at the Roman Forts of Ravenglass, Watercrook and Bowness on Solway (CWAAS, 1979)
• The Changing Landscape of South Etruria (Elek, 1979; Italian edn 1985)
• A Romano-British Village at Grandford, March, Cambs. (with C. F. Potter; British Museum, 1982)
• Roman Britain (British Museum Press, 1983)
• The Thetford Treasure: Roman Jewellery and Silver (with Catherine Johns; British Museum Press, 1983)
• Roman Italy (British Museum Press, 1987; 2nd edn 1992)
• Puckeridge–Braughing, Hertfordshire: the Ermine Street Excavations 1971–72 (with S. D. Trow; 1988)
• Una stipe votiva repubblicana da Ponte di Nona (De Luca, 1989)
• Fouilles du Forum de Cherchel 1977–81 (with N. Benseddik; 1993)
• Towns in Late Antiquity: Iol Caesarea and its Context (Oxbow, 1995)
• Excavations at Stonea, Cambridgeshire 1980–85 (with R. P. J. Jackson; British Museum Press, 1996)
• Excavations at the Mola di Monte Gelato (with A. C. King and others; British School at Rome, 1997)

External links

• "Timothy William Potter, MA, PhD — obituary". Society of Antiquaries of London.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: deprecated archival service (link)