23rd December 2012, 12:38 PM
(This post was last modified: 23rd December 2012, 12:41 PM by Dinosaur.)
Kel Wrote:And there's another good point - are any efforts being made to replace him?
Actually I happen to know that at least one (and probably all) of his regional understudies take stuff to show him, and then occasionally come back with version 2 of their report referring to completely different pot types (eg for one site I have EBA types in version 1, which then became Peterborough Ware in version 2, and we know from TGM that the stuff was shown to him in between!) - this really doesn't inspire confidence for a post-Terry world! He learnt his trade in happier times where you could just turn up at a museum and look at their whole collection and get the whole ones out of the display cases and handle them. I suspect most regional museums these days wouldn't have the time and facilities/space to let one do that? And as Redexile has pointed out, its a lot of knowledge to hold in one's head and takes a lifetime, any TGM replacement should have been started on 30 years ago