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Colin Renfrew, properly known as Lord Renfrew of Kaimsthorn, was made a life peer in 1991. He is director of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge. He has excavated prehistoric sites in the Aegean and the Orkney islands, and is famous for his work on theoretical archaeology. He has also worked on the origins of linguistic diversity, cognitive archaeology and the study of the ancient mind. His latest book, Figuring it Out, is published by Thames and Hudson. Previous books include Loot, Legitimacy and Ownership (Duckworth, 2001) and, with Paul Bahn, the bestselling textbook Archaeology: Theories, methods and practice (Thames and Hudson, 2000).

Does it worry you that the art market preys on the past?

What is clearly immoral and clearly wrong is people going out and looting antiquities, destroying archaeological sites, and trading in unprovenanced artefacts – those whose trading history cannot be traced. You see unprovenanced artefacts displayed shamelessly in some dealers’ windows. Some museums are very reputable but others continue to buy unprovenanced antiquities. They are sanctioning the traffic in looting.

Museums will say that they have no evidence a specific piece is looted. But there is always a risk with an unprovenanced piece that it may have been looted, so collectors who purchase unprovenanced pieces are indirectly supporting the looting process. That does not mean it is their intention to do so. But I get very angry about museums that continue in a shameless way to buy unprovenanced antiquities. I don’t think it happens in Britain any more on any scale, but it does in the US and other countries.

Would you care to name any?

One example from the past is the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which agreed to return the Lydian Hoard to Turkey in 1993 when the Turkish government took it to court. In my book Loot, Legitimacy and Ownership I write about several other museums that have purchased unprovenanced pieces that in some cases have turned out to be looted.

How are you trying to stop the trade in looted antiquities? Does having a parliamentary seat help?

It does help if you’re in Parliament because you can table questions that MPs then have to address. Or if there’s an inquiry or a select committee, I may well be invited to testify. Partly as a result of that, a piece of legislation is going through Parliament now to forbid dealing in unprovenanced cultural objects.

But we have to name and shame the museums and the major collectors that continue to promote this activity and that continue to display looted antiquities. While it may not be their intention, the people showing these are doing great damage and promoting the looting of this heritage.

Recent reports have suggested that Iraq’s museums were not looted to the extent that everyone supposed, and that much of what was stolen was taken by museum staff. Who do we believe?

It was already known, or at least hoped, that the Nimrud Treasure and many other materials at the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad had been stored elsewhere and should have been safe. That is no surprise. We await secure information from those working with the museum in Baghdad as to how much has been stolen.

But I have the impression that there is a deliberate attempt in some quarters to downplay the extent of the looting. The fact is that we do not yet know. What we do know is that the museum was left unprotected for a week against the wishes of General Jay Garner, head of the US administration in Iraq at the time. Suggestions that museum staff may have been responsible for much of the looting should be treated very cautiously. The museum staff are in the main much respected and that could simply be disinformation. What has been clear from the start is that the museum was left unprotected, and that the looting was foreseeable and foreseen.

The art market and archaeology have a troubled relationship. Some dealers have even blamed archaeologists for exacerbating the looting problem…

What is terrible is when people criticise archaeologists for emphasising that some of these objects from the past are very beautiful. They say that by having such high esteem for these objects, you are promoting the market in looting antiquities. I don’t agree with that. You don’t blame the people who invented money for the fact that there are bank robberies.

And do you collect?

I used to, but I don’t now because I realise that it is not a good idea. I have a coin collection, which I stopped adding to 20 years ago. I do have a collection of contemporary art and there these problems don’t arise.

When you were collecting, did you ever unknowingly acquire something you later discovered was looted or unprovenanced?

As a schoolboy I bought a few small Egyptian faience figurines for a couple of pounds. Like nearly all such objects they were entirely without provenance, and like nearly all of them they had clearly been removed from their original contexts, although possibly quite some time earlier. I have not however acquired antiquities since 1970, the date of the UNESCO convention that prohibits the illegal import and export of cultural artefacts. The moral here, of course, is that times change and today I would not purchase an unprovenanced piece precisely because there is the likelihood that it was looted and the possibility that the looting was recent.

Films such as the Indiana Jones series, and TV programmes such as Time Team in the UK, make archaeology look like treasure hunting. Is that a bad thing?

I’m a bit ambivalent about that. There is no doubt that those successful television programmes have attracted a lot of people to archaeology who were not previously interested and made them aware of what archaeology can tell us. That’s useful, but on the other hand the idea that you have to keep on finding things and that it’s all about buried treasure is false, because the purpose of archaeology is to find out about the past, not just to find things.

When did you become interested in archaeology? Were your parents involved?

My parents weren’t particularly involved in archaeology. When I was a very small boy my father used to take me to look at parish churches. And then I got curious about archaeology and started digging as soon as I could. From about the age of 13 I was excavating constantly – Romano-British sites to start with, and Canterbury in particular.

What attracted you to prehistory – the study of humans before the written word – and the Aegean, given that you started with Roman Britain?

The fascination with archaeology is to try to work out who we are in the sense of how did we get here, which makes prehistory particularly interesting. There is no doubt that Aegean prehistory is particularly attractive, and I had the good fortune of going on a very good excavation in northern Greece while I was an undergraduate. It was a very early Neolithic site and a good experience. That encouraged me later, when I was thinking what to do as a research project, to visit Athens National Museum. I saw a lot of rich material in the museum on the prehistory of the Cycladic islands. Nothing really interesting had been written about that for 40 years, and it was clearly ripe for reinterpretation.

Is it possible, as some claim, to be an archaeologist without knowing about science these days?

Archaeology is enquiry, and all systematic enquiry is scientia – knowledge – so all archaeology is science in that sense. If you see it in that light, then you should be able to seek help in your research from any other areas of knowledge. At Cambridge, Joe Cann and I researched obsidian together and discovered that obsidian from different sources could be distinguished on the basis of trace elements. We were lucky: it turned out that, not just in the Aegean but throughout the Near East, just about all the early Neolithic sites were part of an obsidian trading network.

Trace-element analysis or radiocarbon dating is one area, but knowledge of early languages or indeed of art are also relevant to our attempts to know about and understand the human past. There shouldn’t be a problem with multidisciplinary approaches. For example, it is important for any archaeologist to be aware of how data is collected. It makes sense for archaeologists to dig. They don’t need to spend all their time digging, but it is important to be a dirt archaeologist. It is also important to ask questions, and as soon as you ask questions you have to have some idea how to answer them. And to answer a question, you really have to construct a theory.

Your new book, Figuring It Out, is about art and archaeology. What fascinates you about that relationship?

What has struck me very much over the years, and what led me to write the book, is that as archaeologists we are trying to learn about the past through the medium of material culture – through the things that we find. Artists, particularly contemporary artists, are questioning different aspects of the world and thinking about the world in all kinds of different ways. For example, some artists are doing extraordinary installation art, or art as part of the landscape. Others are using bric-a-brac from daily life. These artists are involved with contemporary material culture in a whole range of different ways.

There is a strong analogy between the archaeologist and the gallery-goer. The archaeologist says, what does this stuff I’m finding all mean? What does it add up to? What can you infer from the material culture the archaeologist studies? If you go to the Tate Modern gallery in London, you’ve got all this stuff and you have to say, wait a moment, what is this? What’s going on here? What’s happening? And you have to be responsible for making sense out of what is a form of material culture. As archaeologists we can be helped to think in fresh ways about the world, about material culture which is our stock in trade, by looking at all the things that contemporary artists are doing with material culture. In a slightly different way that is their stock in trade too.

Are there particular artists that exemplify these ideas?

Yes. I’ve been very much impressed by the work of the artist Richard Long. His main activity is walking. He goes for long walks but he leaves a record of the walk in different ways. It may be a map he has prepared, or he may leave a line of stones in the landscape, just a small variation. It’s never a big imposing thing. He may rearrange twigs or something and photograph that. Some of his work makes you much more sensitive to the human presence in the landscape, and to the traces that humans have left. Some of them may remind you of prehistoric monuments, and they lead you to think in a different way about the people who made those monuments and what they thought they were doing when they rearranged their stones in the landscape.

Where do you go from here?

I have a publication backlog. Once that is out of the way I shall be a free man, a free agent to return to the field.