My Passion With Chris Clements

Chris Clements is a partner in the forensic and investigation team at Grant Thornton in Yorkshire

I studied archaeology at university and loved how it enabled you to reconstruct the past from tiny pieces of evidence that had been meticulously gathered – you haven’t lived until you have excavated a building armed with only a tiny trowel and a toothbrush.

I trained as an archaeologist thanks to my mother who was a history teacher and gave me a love of the past. As a kid, she had no trouble taking me around historical sites and imbued me with her passion. It’s so amazing to see the fossilised fingerprints of life from hundreds, thousands or even millions of years ago.

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However, as there are relatively few jobs in archaeology it has, by default, become more of a passion than a career. Besides, you should never have your hobby as your job, it just ruins the enjoyment. So, on graduation, I started my accountancy studies which link business to maths, one of my other passions. To be honest, I hated it when I started, but three weeks into my career, I discovered forensic accountancy which also involved reconstructing evidence and meticulous detail (just like archaeology) and, of course, mathematics.

Although still a member of the Council for British Archaeology, unfortunately these days I don’t have time to go off on digs. Instead, I attempt to share my interest with my family – doing the same as my mother and dragging them round castles, cathedrals and holes in the ground at every opportunity. So far, they seem less enthusiastic than me about all things ancient, but they humour me and I remain hopeful that they’ll eventually understand my fascination. I also continue to feed my passion vicariously, by spending a small fortune on archaeology literature and losing myself in articles about the latest discoveries.

One of the most incredible finds in archaeology for me is the Laitoli footprints in Tanzania – the footprints of our predecessors. These are the oldest known footprints of early humans, preserved in wet volcanic ash. The prints are close together and are produced by three individuals, one walking in the footprints of the other. There are these tiny footprints next to larger ones. There’s no evidence to say it definitely was a family, but that’s the joy of archaeology, you have the facts to get to the truth, but there’s always that extra room for the imagination.

Archaeology reaches into the darkest depths of history, before records began – but those prehistoric days make up over 99 per cent of total human history.

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So my passion for archaeology and my job in forensic accountancy dovetail beautifully – it’s the investigative work I love that’s so similar to the buzz I get from archaeology, reconstructing the facts from scraps of evidence and being meticulous about what evidence you do have.