Amateurs and Professionals

Abstract

Until the 1950s, most people who called themselves professional archaeologists would probably have said, as Sir Leonard Woolley and Sir Max Mallowan did, that they had blundered into archaeology in the first place. Fate simply turned their steps in that direction and a combination of luck, common sense and working with the right people allowed them to make a reasonable, sometimes a great success of the job. What happened to Dr Ralegh Radford,¹ now in his late seventies, is fairly typical of the interwar period.