Faculty Profile:

David Scott

How did you become interested in archaeology?

My interest in things archaeological was aroused by numerous visits to the British Museum in London where the Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Greek, and Ethnographic collections exerted a strong fascination. At that time the Easter Island statue had not left for the Museum of Mankind in Burlington Arcade, near Saville Row, and one could admire this magnificent sculpture on the main staircase.

Being a chemist from an early age, I was aware of the activities of the early chemists such as Michael Faraday and Humphry Davy in their interests in the materials of ancient objects, and this was a path of study that had an appeal, although at the time I had little realization that I would be able to devote myself to the analysis and conservation of ancient art and artefacts.

Tell us about the new conservation program.

The program has had a long gestation of sixteen years, from an idea to something that will come to pass in 2005 or at the latest 2006, but we are fairly determined to begin the new MA Program in the Conservation of Archaeological and Ethnographic Materials in the fall of 2005.

The Getty Conservation Institute has to take credit for seeing this idea through to fruition, with the building of a new conservation teaching and training facility at the old Getty Villa site in Malibu, which is also scheduled to re-open to the public in 2005. UCLA and the Getty Trust reached an agreement on the formulation and responsibilities of each Institution to the running of this new program, which is an exciting collaboration and one which will enable the new program to benefit from the considerable strengths of both Institutions.
The new program will be a three year MA degree, which will comprise two years of taught coursework and one year of supervised internship. A maximum of twelve students will be admitted to the program every second year, and the students will have their fees paid for them by an endowment set up specifically for the purpose, and shared between the Getty and UCLA. This should ensure that there is no shortage of applicants!

There will be three faculty positions paid for by UCLA for the teaching of this new program, and we are currently advertising for an archaeological and an ethnographic conservator to form the complement of staff for the degree program.
Since the conservation of archeological and ethnographic materials is such a broad topic, we are anticipating many different types of collaboration across both the UCLA campus and across the width and breadth of Los Angeles. We are already working on materials from the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History and from the collections of the Department of Religion at the University of Southern California.
As the course begins to be integrated with the Getty Villa location, increasing collaboration with the conservators at the Getty Museum itself will also be possible and beneficial to the students and staff on the UCLA MA program.

Tell us your best archaeology story.

I was obviously destined to be undertaking work of this kind. At the age of 14 I had recently read Sir Mortimer Wheeler's Archaeology from the Earth, in which the late Ione Gedye described the materials and methods used for the lifting of Roman mosaics by rolling them up adhered to a thick muslin cloth, allowing them to be displaced from the earth or ground behind them. Inspired by this possibility, I made a small green briefcase into a traveling lifting laboratory in the fantasy of finding a Roman mosaic that I could then lift with my chemicals and equipment, which traveled with me from London to Worcester Park to visit my maiden aunt. Sadly, I never spotted a Roman mosaic, which is perhaps just as well, but this was obviously in my blood, although buried really until after I finished my degree in chemistry and began to study archaeological conservation in 1974, at the age of 26.