Titus Panhuysen

I have a strong affinity with the city of Maastricht (The Netherlands). I was born there in 1949, grew up and returned there. In my youngest days there were frequent excavations by the State Service for Archaeology, carried out under the direction of professor Jules Bogaers (University of Nijmegen). I remember I was always at the site from the beginning of the sixties onwards. In those days Roman Maastricht rose above ground, and water, because even the bottom of the river Maas did not escape archaeological investigation.
In 1968 I went to study archaeology, of course in Nijmegen, and also studied art history and ancient history, and obtained my PhD in February 1974. A wonderful period of research followed which was funded by the Dutch Organisation for pure Scientific Research (ZWO/NWO) during which I travelled through the whole of Western Europe, studying Gallo-Roman sculptures in the museums, and establishing a most useful scholarly network. This had to result in the publication of a thesis on the Roman sculptured stones of Maastricht, discovered in 1963 in the remnants of the Roman bridge over the river Maas. This work was completed in 1996 as a volume of the Corpus Signorum Imperii Romani and was extended with the results of more than fifteen years of my own excavations in the city, after I had been appointed by the Maastricht council in 1979 to become the first town archaeologist there.
After 1979 my relatively quiet work in the offices of the university and its library was over. An amazing period began with the most exciting excavations an archaeologist could ever imagine in the old town of Maastricht, with much Roman and even more Early Medieval subjects. It was also arduous, because no legal framework for archaeology existed yet, there were virtually no staff, no regulations, no procedures and hardly any money. And every year the city finance director threatened to abolish archaeology, because it was – in his mind - supposedly a state concern in those days. And then, always at precisely the right time, there was that one unique find, which was my special trick every year. Years of hard work and beautiful discoveries resulted in an ever stronger position for municipal archaeology. But, at a certain time my position became too strong from the perspective of some high ranking city developers and councillors, persons who seemed to be less supportive after each new election. Then the time came when I had less fun in Maastricht. Now I think that the pioneering town archaeologists of my generation with all their struggles planted the seed for today’s legal system on the very basis of the Treaty on Archaeological Heritage of Malta (1992). The fighting is over now, funds for managing the past are guaranteed and research can be done according to fixed rules. My career in Maastricht from 1979 to 2004 was great. There was no bureaucracy, I was allowed to be a proper archaeologist, creative, a scholar, and the town itself was one large and continuous excavation project. Only, we lacked everything we needed, especially money, a professional staff with sufficient expertise, time to do things, and a work environment with an understanding of the depth and scope of scholarly research. The greatest problem resulting from this was the huge amount of information and documentation that piled up without the opportunities of analysing and publishing it sufficiently.
In 2004, tired of the municipal constraints, but certainly not less motivated, I moved over to the University of Amsterdam to the Saint Servatius Research Project under the direction of professor Frans Theuws (who has moved since 2012 to the University of Leiden). The excavations of the State Service in 1953-1954 in the Cloister of the Church of Saint Servatius, in 1969-1970 on the immense site of the nearby Vrijthof, and also my own excavations in 1981-1990 in the interior of the church which goes back to the Late Roman and Merovingian Periods are now being analysed by our team of enthusiastic archaeologists and should be published (from 2017 onwards, Habelt Verlag Bonn).
For me the mission of archaeology is helping people to see their own selves reflected in the mirror of the fragile material witnesses of history that we are discovering as archaeologists. And, of course, also putting us into perspective, always remaining critical of the own ideas and theories, and where possible and necessary, questioning them by new and better arguments.