This is the first column I write from my new and — being frank, somewhat more sparse — desk space, following the rearrangement of the office by my truly wonderful editor Síri Ospley, who never ceases to amaze. As explained elsewhere, Síri has found it necessary to escape our glass ceiling. I for my part quite enjoy the skylight window. The light always reminds me of my fieldworks in the Maghreb. That was the start of a lifelong aversion against that pitfall of so much archaeological talent: the theory trap.

One memorable night in the early ’60s, I was in a crowded, dusty bar room in Algiers. The place was crammed with French émigré intellectuals: Marxists, existentialists, Freudians, Lacanians, phenomenologists, and what-have-you. One guy asked if I was into Merleau-Ponty. I told him I was more into Merle Haggard.

I fled to a different table at which a quiet, stern fellow was reading. Another Frenchman, who went by the name of Pierre. He was an ethnographer, right out of Paris, here in Algiers to study the Kabyle. He looked probingly at me. ‘You’re not an existentialist, are you?’

‘Hell no!’ I said. ‘I don’t give a damn about metaphysics. Give me structures, that’s my trade’.

Pierre looked as if lightening had struck him. ‘Is this true? I’ve been the only one here for weeks! The Lévi-Strauss school?’

‘That’s my man! Just put me to work in a pair of Levi Strauss’s finest, and I’ll dig right into it!’

Pierre was all excitement. He pointed around the room ‘You see, these people are all stuck with essences. You and I, we know it’s in the fabric!’

‘That’s right!’ I exclaimed. ‘“Carefully inspect the sewing”, as the label says. Nobody can stitch it like good old Levi Strauss’.

‘I must look up that quote’, Pierre mumbled. He ordered a bottle for each of us, all the same wine, but he insisted that we shared both, pouring from his first, before instructing me to offer mine. Ah, the French!

The night wore on with talk. Pierre was a good fellow, but lost in theory, no matter how much he would pretend to talk about structures. The bar closed, and as we walked back, we passed an old Kabyle house. I thought I’d teach him a lesson and dragged him into the ruins. ‘Look, my friend, this is where our work starts, these are structures!’

‘Mais comment ça, Monsieur Dweller?’, he asked. ‘I see only ruins, where is… the mental?’

‘The mental? I’ll tell you who’s a mental if you’re not seeing any structures!’ I had often stayed with the Kabyle during my surveys, and made friends with quite a few. I knew their housing well.

‘Here’s where the cows would have been, a wet and dirty place’, I pointed. ‘And in the opposite corner they would store dried grain. Here on the north side was the weaving loom — that’s for women, you know. Now don’t come close, Pierre, we two belong here on the dark side, ha!’

Pierre was stupefied ‘Touché, Monsieur Dweller! This house is almost, que dire… like a world of structure’, he said.

‘Ah, but don’t forget, the house is a ladies’ world!’ I laughed. ‘A world reversed!’

‘A world reversed…’, he repeated. His eyes grew glazed. I could see I had nailed him with that one.

Poor Pierre, lost in his books. I would have been happy to say that my advice brought him on to better things, but he went back to Paris, and I guess he never put all his logic into practice. I suppose he never knew the distinction.