TAG began in Southampton in December 1977 with a seminar-like gathering of staff and students from the archaeology departments of the universities of Southampton and Sheffield. The following year a reciprocal meeting was held at Sheffield. From December 1979 the meetings became open conferences and have taken place annually ever since, hosted by archaeology departments across Britain in and Ireland.
TAG was first mentioned in Antiquity in 1984 when Nick Merriman introduced the sixth meeting hosted at the University of Cambridge (58: 215). Several later meetings were also announced in editorials and reviews (62: 8; 65: 274-8; 57: 154-5), while Andrew Fleming and Matthew Johnson presented an extensive discussion of the origins and development of the Group through to 1990 (64: 303-306).
The emergence of post-modernism in archaeological theory was the theme of John Bintliffe’s analysis of the twelfth meeting held in Lampeter (65: 274-8), which should be read alongside a response from Julian Thomas and Chris Tilley (66: 106-14). The most recent history of TAG is that presented by Bisserka Gaydarska which brings the story up to 2009 (83: 1152-62).
