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2012 Alumni Award winner John Humphrey ’67: Committed to the scholarly life B Y
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Growing up in England, John H. Humphrey ’67 was always aware of history and historical places. “I had a collection of perhaps 200 guidebooks for historic sites in my bedroom, next to my bed,” he says.
BELOW: John H. Humphrey
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“My parents were very educated and well informed,” John recalls. “And they loved the countryside. They loved history. So every chance we had, we would go for a walk on the Downs, or we would visit Roman villas – not so much museums, but we visited historic sites, which in England are very well maintained. Historic churches, too. Any archaeological site we passed, we stopped at.” At that point, John did not have his eyes set particularly on archaeology. “I did classics,” he says. “My mother taught high school Latin, so it almost came naturally to me.” After he had graduated from the British equivalent of high school in Bath, he spent a year at Hotchkiss in an English Speaking Union program. Once again, classical languages were among the subjects he enjoyed. “Allan Hoey taught Latin,” he says. “He was a real academic – a serious, serious scholar.” But he also had other academic interests, winning a School music prize. “It was for a paper on Bartok’s string quartets,” John explains, “which I’m a bit embarrassed about now, because when you get older you realize that what you did when you were young wasn’t very good. The Bartok string quartets are very difficult works to disentangle.”
A G A Z I N E
He enjoyed his year at School. “All the faculty were so friendly and supportive,” he says. “Even those I didn’t have classes with knew me, and then made arrangements for the summer, when I decided I was going to travel all around North America. Some got in touch with their relatives to arrange for me to stay with them on my travels, as did several of my classmates. People were incredibly hospitable to a foreigner.”
Developing a Passion It was when he returned to England, to start studying at Cambridge University, that he focused more and more on Roman archaeology, especially outside of Italy. “When I was at [high] school in Bath, which is a Roman city, I had done my first excavation on Hadrian’s Wall, and I liked it,” he says. “At Cambridge, my adviser, Michael Vickers, worked quite a lot in Greece, and so I was always hearing about the Roman provinces from him. Then when I did my dissertation, more of my time was spent traveling around the Roman empire. I became very interested in the provinces early on.” John’s classmate, Mark Pierce ’67, who now lives in Connecticut and is vice president of a pharmaceutical company, studied in England after Hotchkiss; he spent the Christmas of 1967 with John and his family in Sussex. “The atmosphere was warm and lively,” he says. “John made a point of showing me the sights in the area of historical and architectural interest. It was obvious that history was his passion.” He became particularly knowledgeable about circuses – structures designed for chariot races and other shows. “What I was really interested in was how the buildings were built for the sport of racing chariots,” he says. “The answer is they were designed very, very carefully. They didn’t just enclose a field and have the char-