David Trump was an archaeologist who took as much pleasure in excavating Malta’s prehistoric temples — many of which had survived millennia — as discovering the charred remains of a bread roll or a sherd of pottery.
Both helped to put Malta on the archaeological map and made Trump something of a hero on the rocky islands once described by DH Lawrence as “stark as a corpse”. However, to specialists such as Trump, Malta was a “veritable museum”. Over 60 years, he showed its temples to be the oldest freestanding stone monuments in the world and beneath them discovered the remains of their mysterious Mediterranean builders, from a civilisation that lasted from roughly 3000 to 1800 BC before vanishing.
A nimble figure, with a crop of sometimes unruly hair, Trump was at his happiest sitting amid hundreds of pot sherds, washing and sorting them. “I am a pot man,” he once professed. Fortunately, his wife was also an archaeologist and worked closely with him.
In the Sixties, he uncovered a half-burnt bread roll in the ashes of a tower built almost 2,000 years earlier. “Archaeologists are not digging for things but for people,” he said of the excitement he felt, “and the roll brings to mind the people who were meant to eat it. It brings the past to life.” He believed that it was the only roll from the Roman era on the islands.
He also found a golden earring around the same site that leant itself to a tale of the fire. “The story more or less leapt out at us. In one of the two doorways leading out of a room there were two little bronze buckets, one inside the other, lying on their side and partly crushed,” he said. “My story is this: the lady of the house was inside when the fire alarm was raised. She dashed out, grabbing her jewel box, tripped on the buckets, dropped the box, hastily scooped up what she could back into the box and then made a dash for the door and the open air . . . missing one earring.”
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Never a man to follow fashion — in fact he shunned it — he was as frugal in adopting colourful theories as in other areas of his life. At home in Cambridge, for instance, his food was foraged and furniture was salvaged with some relish from rubbish dumps long before either became a trend.
David Hilary Trump was born in 1931 in Chelmsford, Essex. His father, Tom, worked at Marconi, developing radio and radar, and his mother, Doris, looked after a busy household of four children. As a boy, Trump discovered an interest in archaeology while helping his father at an excavation of a Roman road exposed by wartime bombing.
He also acquired an encyclopaedic knowledge of plants, trees, birds and insects and would go through periodic crazes for each, searching beneath hedgerows for a particular snail. His sharp eyes were infamous. His sister recalled he once spotted the head of a pine marten poking out of a cave high up on an Italian hillside while ferrying her at speed on the back of his Vespa.
Trump read archaeology at Pembroke College, Cambridge, from where he was soon launching expeditions to the Outer Hebrides, Balochistan and Iceland. He made his first visit to Malta in 1954 to assist with excavations at the Ggantija temple on Gozo. Then from 1958 until Maltese independence in 1964, he was the curator of archaeology at the National Museum of Malta, during which time he excavated prehistoric temples and domestic huts at Skorba that have since been given Unesco status. Using meticulous modern methods he dated charcoal remains back to earlier than 3600BC.
“He uncovered a half-burnt roll in the ashes of a 2,000-year-old tower
He became used to living in some austerity. When Colin Renfrew volunteered to help in 1960, Trump replied that anyone was welcome, but there was no budget: “If you don’t mind roughing it a bit I can find you a bed in my flat at Rabat, where catering can be organised economically . . .”
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On a field trip to the Lipari islands, off the coast of Sicily, he impressed a student, Bridget Wilson, who became his wife in 1961. A sharp, handsome young man, he also stood out for his skill in hitting the waiter at a restaurant with peas from a pod one evening.
They, naturally, spent their honeymoon in Malta. Within a few days he had received a call to say that Royal Navy divers had found a sunken Roman galley and would Trump kindly catalogue the cargo of amphora. “If an archaeologist is marrying at all, he or she must find another archaeologist,” he once said. “The subject is so enthralling and absorbing that to marry someone who wasn’t interested in it would be a big mistake.”
In 1964 they returned to Cambridge, where Trump taught. They made their home for the next 50 years in De Freville Avenue and had three sons: Roger, now a computer expert in Cambridge; Eric, a deputy head of a school in Esher; and Gavin, who organises early school education.
Trump’s skills for gluing pot sherds together for museums were frequently brought to bear on household crockery. A visitor who did not choose wisely from the collection of cups in the kitchen cupboard might find coffee gently leaking into their lap. Delivering evening classes around East Anglia also gave him ample opportunity to collect roadkill — in the form of rabbits, hares and pheasants — for the freezer. He kept fertiliser sacks in the boot and one Christmas carved a peahen for lunch.
The house also boasted a large cellar where he spent hours making wines from surplus vegetables or elderflowers, berries and stinging nettles. Some labels read “GOK”, which meant, simply, “God only knows”.
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Until a few years ago, he regularly conducted coach parties of enthusiastic amateurs around the Mediterranean — taking his wife and children on their holidays. Younger colleagues found it hard to catch up with him as he seemed to skip on the rocky landscape, suddenly jumping into a pit to illustrate a point. Nothing could stop him from a swim — not even in November. Publications were produced with the same energy, if somewhat streamlined in content. The Times of Malta described him as “an icon” and he received the Maltese National Order of Merit, a rare distinction for a non-Maltese.
He spent a lot of time in a rented cottage in mid-Wales with no running water, sewerage or electricity, and later bought a cottage in Norfolk, filling the grounds with plants collected on his travels.
His enthusiasms extended to knitting — one friend possessed a pair of Trump’s carefully crafted gloves — much to the surprise of the men in the bars of southern Italy in the Fifties. He also enjoyed plotting circular walking routes. Rather than waste money on new maps, he would add new features and bypasses with a red pencil crayon. As a result, long marches often ended at bleak farmhouses with barking dogs, or passing Ministry of Defence warning signs. Unconcerned, he quoted what became his motto: “Keep going until you’re stopped!”
David Trump, archaeologist, was born on August 27, 1931. He died suddenly on August 31, 2016, aged 85