My first trip to the Institute was for my interview with Clive Orton. I instantly fell in love with everything about the place, and although I had only travelled from West London, I felt transported to somewhere new and alien. It was a real shame then that I left the interview thinking that there was no chance they would accept me. I spoke with the other interviewees and they had been to Egypt, they had already done fieldwork – and I had done nothing of the sort. It was a huge relief when I was accepted, and I will be forever grateful to Clive for seeing something in me that I wasn’t sure was there.
Joining the Institute and setting off for its three-day experimental Prim Tech (since renamed Archaeotech) archaeology course was an experience I will never forget. I spent many hours scraping and cleaning a sheep skin, which I proudly took back as a memento! This was my kind of place.
I learnt how to excavate, like so many others, at the Barcombe Roman Villa excavation site in Sussex. I was fortunate enough to then go on and teach on an archaeology summer school at Bishopstone, also in Sussex, with Gabor Thomas (also an Institute graduate), where I later became one of the site supervisors for the next three years (Figure 1). I loved using my hands and my mind together.
David Staunton supervising on site at Bishopstone 2005
There is a physicality to archaeology that is special and rare. I ventured to Romania to survey with Kris Lockyear by the Danube, which was my first real foray abroad and is still a trip I remember fondly. I excavated in Buckfastleigh, Devon, with Andrew Reynolds, taking pride in overseeing the test pitting programme (who doesn’t like the neat edge of a pit?) and did various bits and pieces across the UK. I even returned to Barcombe with Alex Patterson (yet another Institute alumnus) where we were cooks for a year. No mention of the Institute is complete without Judy Medrington, the Department’s Academic Administrator. Kindness is not a virtue we celebrate enough, and she has it in abundance.
Archaeology was a way for me to have little and big adventures. I spent months on end living in a tent, I learnt how to drive a mini-digger, I learnt so many new skills, I cooked lots of burgers and sausages for the excavation parties on Friday nights and I had a blast.
When I graduated, a niggling injury in my left shoulder meant I never felt comfortable enough to commit full-time to field archaeology. Instead, archaeology became a hobby, which I still have, and it became odd days and long weekends.
I was around 24 when I first set foot inside an office. It was a real culture shock and took quite a lot of getting used to. I took with me the cache of attending UCL, which you are obviously immune to while there, and what cannot be underestimated, the cool factor of having studied a degree in something interesting and unusual.
The greatest gift that I left the Institute with was critical thinking. It changed how I looked at the world, how I processed information, how I developed and refined conclusions. Higher education is a conflicted topic now, but the skills that I learnt at the Institute translated directly into the IT and software industry where I spent the next 15 years.
I have always been fascinated by technology and the potential it brings. After a return to the Bartlett School of Planning in 2010 for my master’s (another oasis within UCL) and having been made redundant for the second time in my career, I pivoted to technology and began a new career as a solution architect, designing how systems interact with each other. On the face of it, they couldn’t be further apart but when you start to drill down you can see how the skills that you learnt are so easily transferred. Understanding how one system talks to another is no different from trying to decipher the section at a busy site. I spent years travelling around the world, talking tech, understanding challenges and building solutions for retailers and then later within cyber security sector.
In December 2020 I became extremely ill. I was told that I would never recover and that my life would be forever affected: I had a one in a million chance to get better and I thought it was well worth the try. I set about to heal myself, despite the apparent impossibility. It’s a much longer story, but I was able to go from bed-bound to marathon runner (Figure 2) and make not only a full recovery but ending up even healthier than when I had begun. That journey taught me so much about myself, and, more importantly, the impact of limitations that are placed on us by the world.
David Staunton 26 km into the Copenhagen Marathon 2024
I left the tech sector, took a year off and went travelling with Natalie, my now wife, for a year. We moved to Copenhagen and began a new chapter of our lives. I retrained as a functional medicine health coach and I now work with clients all over the world so they can achieve their one in a million chance too.
People often ask me about how I was able to achieve such a miraculous recovery. It’s no understatement that many of those skills were honed while in the world-class corridors of the Institute. Being around hugely talented people raises your expectations of what is possible and shows you that you can achieve more.
Would I ever return to archaeology? Yes. I have recently been feeling more and more that there is unfinished business to attend to. I don’t know yet what form that will take, but I know that I’ll return to it with a huge smile on my face.