What books have influenced me in my career? Which have I enjoyed, rather than read out of duty? Which, if any, would I take to a desert island?

If I am really honest, I would probably take with me some of the great works of literature rather than any archaeological books. Tolstoy, Proust, Dickens, Eliot: what archaeological writer can even begin to measure up to them? For that matter, how could I not have the two Alice books, or P.G. Wodehouse, or Evelyn Waugh?

From Darwin to Kafka: five books that made my life

If I had to pick up five books to take with me to a desert island I would probably only opt for poetry, as this is what I never get tired of reading over and over again. Should I then write about my favourite poets? I am not so sure that readers would be that interested, and also I feel that poetry is there more to be enjoyed than intellectualised. I would rather take the alternative route of discussing the books that most of all have contributed to shape my thought and personality. My shortlist, perhaps disappointingly, does not include any archaeology book. Many of them I have liked and some I have also found inspiring, but, if I have be fully honest, archaeology books do not figure among my most important influences. Having said that, all books in my selection are relevant to archaeology and have certainly affected my interpretation.

This is a difficult question. I’ve spent more time thinking about it than I sometimes do on articles twenty times as long, only to come to the same conclusion as in too many of these articles: I don’t know. In part, that’s because there seem to be at least three ways to take the question. First, if I really were marooned on a desert island, I’m not sure that I’d want any of my five books to be archaeological. I find it hard to imagine curling up under a palm tree with a faunal report. But that said, I’m not sure that I’d want to take the sort of books I usually read either—spending the rest of my life in the company of Harry Potter or the kind of science fiction novels I like to pick up in airport bookstores is almost as scary as being surrounded by site reports. If I only had five books to read over and over again I suspect that the closest I’d want to get to archaeology would be Gibbon’s Decline and Fall and a set of Shakespeare. I think I’d also take what I think are the three best novels ever written: Dickens’ Bleak House, Giovanni di Lampedusa’s Sicilian classic The Leopard, and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. Or maybe William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, but that makes six.

This edition of Desert Island Books is reposted from Assemblage 4 (1998)

Five books worth recommending to a postgrad novitiate? Very tricky: my mind at present is currently preoccupied with Upper Siwalik palaeontology (which is very boring to anyone remotely normal); also, we rarely recommend anything these days to students outside essential texts, given the pressures of submission dates and so on; and what I read 30 years ago is no use now, as my first postgraduate research was on early farming in Bulgaria, and not on early hominids in south Asia. In any case, there are so many wonderful books to read -- and so many awful ones to avoid.... I'll leave out some of my favourite types of books, like climbing guides, wood-working texts, and spy thrillers, and stick to ones of a wider relevance.