Jacquetta Hawkes

. Born Jessie Jacquetta Hopkins, on 5 August 1910 in Cambridge, she was the youngest child of Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins (1861–1947), biochemist and Nobel Prize winner, and his wife Jessie Ann (1869–1956), daughter of Edward William Stevens, ship's fitter, of Ramsgate. She had one brother and one sister. Her parents met at Guy's Hospital, where they both worked. From 1921 to 1928 she attended Perse School for Girls, going on in 1929 to study the new degree of Archaeology & Anthropology at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she was the first woman to do so. In her second year at university she took part in the excavation of a Roman site near Colchester, and there met her future first husband, the archaeologist Christopher Hawkes (1905–1992). She graduated with a first-class honours degree from the University of Cambridge. == Early career ==

After her graduation, in 1932, she travelled to Palestine and joined the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, in order to excavate on Mount Carmel, alongside Yusra and Dorothy Garrod. In 1935 she led a BBC Radio programme "Ancient Britain Out of Doors", introducing key ideas about archaeology then discussing them with colleagues Stuart Piggott and Nowell Myres. As a result of the academic success of the monograph, she was elected as a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. The excavation was funded by the Office of Public Works Employment Relief Scheme. == World War II ==

portrait by Lady Ottoline Morrell Hawkes and her son moved to Dorset early in the war, when Britain was facing the threat of invasion. In her memoir A Quest of Love, Hawkes described how, while in Dorset, her "violent emotional involvement with a woman" was "a sudden undamning of feelings of an intensity that I did not know I possessed". During the latter half of the Blitz Hawkes returned to London and began work in the civil service. During her time as Secretary, a major task was the preparations for UNESCO's first conference, which was held in Mexico City in 1947. One of the UK representatives was her future husband, J. B. Priestley, although Hawkes initially opposed his inclusion. However, at the conference Hawkes and Priestley fell in love. Priestley famously described Hawkes's demeanour as "Ice without! Fire within!" == Festival of Britain ==

poster In 1949 Hawkes left the civil service, in order to work full-time as a writer. In 1950 the British Film Institute made her a governor. One of her first creative projects was as archaeological advisor to the Festival of Britain in 1951, where she produced the 'People of Britain' pavilion. The pavilion's architect was H. T. Cadbury Brown and it was designed by James Gardner. The vision of the pavilion created by Hawkes showed archaeological sites as if they were being discovered for the first time, proceeding chronologically from a prehistoric burial, to a Bronze Age gold necklace, to a Roman mosaic floor. After the Roman section, visitors met a recreation of the Sutton Hoo ship burial. == A Land (1951) ==

Published one month after the opening of the Festival of Britain, and perhaps Hawkes's most widely recognised work, A Land (1951) characterised the archaeology of Britain, and thus the story of Britishness, as one of repeated waves of migration. The book was illustrated by Henry Moore. even Hawkes was aware that it was a difficult book to classify. it was a bestseller in the UK and was described in the same year, by Robert Macfarlane, as "one of the defining British non-fiction books of the postwar decade". == Marriage to J. B. Priestley ==

, 1953 Jacquetta and Christopher Hawkes divorced in 1953; she married Priestley the same year. They lived on the Isle of Wight, before moving to Alveston, Warwickshire, in 1960. During their marriage, they collaborated on a number of experimental literary works, including the play ''Dragon's Mouth, and an epistolary work entitled Journey Down a Rainbow'', based on imagined letters. Priestley's letters in the work were set in a "brash new America in Texas", whilst Hawkes's were written from the perspectives of indigenous societies in New Mexico. == Research in the 1950s ==

The script for the 1953 film Figures in a Landscape, a documentary about the work of Barbara Hepworth, was written by Hawkes. In 1956 she began excavations on the Mottistone Estate, whose land adjoined her and Priestley's home of Brook Hill House. The subject of Hawkes's investigation was The Longstone; her research, which was published in Antiquity, demonstrated that it was the remains of the entrance to a Neolithic long barrow. == Activism ==

Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament Politically engaged, in late 1957 and early 1958 she and Priestley were part of a group of co-founders of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). CND officially launched at Central Hall, Westminster, on 17 February 1958. Its institutional origins have been described as an "elite pressure group", established as a "gathering" between peers, such as Bertrand Russell, George Kennan, Denis Healey and other public figures, who all knew each other. A member of the executive committee, Hawkes was active at the first Aldermaston March held on 4–7 April 1958. Despite this Hawkes characterised the work of CND as a "moral crusade" rather than a political one. She also founded the Women's Committee of CND. Homosexual Law Reform Society Hawkes was active in campaigning for the decriminalisation of gay sex through the Homosexual Law Reform Society (HLRS), of which she was a founding member. Its establishment was announced by a letter in The Times. Committee meetings were held at her and Priestley's flat – B4 Albany – which led to its use as the name for the Albany Trust. The group, all "ostensibly heterosexual" according to David Minto, aimed to challenge societal attitudes to homosexuality through "objectivity". Campaign for the Preservation of Rural England After Hawkes and Priestley moved to Alveston, Warwickshire, in the early 1960s, she became President of the Warwickshire branch of the Campaign for the Preservation of Rural England and a trustee of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. ==Archaeological work in the 1960s==

Her archaeological research continued, co-editing with Leonard Woolley UNESCO's book on prehistory entitled History of Mankind, which was published in 1963. Hawkes was responsible for writing the sections on the Paleolithic and Neolithic, whereas Woolley's approach renounced the global and he wrote on the Bronze Age in the area that was then termed "the Fertile Crescent". Hawkes was one of the archaeologists who first proposed that women were the rulers of the ancient Minoans; the idea had been discussed previously by historians of culture and religion, such as Joseph Campbell, and it had also been discussed as part of feminist discourse. She used evidence from art to argue that the society was matriarchal: "the absence of these manifestations of the all-powerful male ruler that are so widespread at this time and in this stage of cultural development as to be almost universal, is one of the reasons for supposing that the occupants of Minoan thrones may have been queens". Reviewed by Frank Stubbings, he praised the book, describing how "the writer remembers always that these were real human beings"; however, he also had several caveats – some on questions of dating, but most of all on account of the poetic language used by Hawkes. Archaeologist Nicoletta Momigliano has placed Hawkes's Dawn of the Gods as part of a canon of 1960s "pacifist and hippie interpretations" that were influenced by Jungian psychology. Also in 1968, Hawkes published a paper in Antiquity entitled "The Proper Study of Mankind". In it, she argued against an over-emphasis on science in archaeological discourse. In 1973, James Feibleman challenged her interpretation of archaeological science as reductionist. == Later life ==

In 1971, Hawkes was elected vice-president of the Council for British Archaeology in recognition of her life's work. It was described by the New York Times critic Katha Pollitt as "antifeminist", a "humourless rambling document" and a "masochistic fantasia of the unconscious". However, in a 2018 reappraisal of the work, literary theorist Ina Habermann described it as a "visionary autobiography" and an "overlooked exercise in écriture feminine". In 1982 she published a biography of Mortimer Wheeler. Priestley died in 1984. After his death Hawkes moved to Chipping Camden and continued her interests in archaeology and science, particularly ornithology. Noted for her striking looks, she was the subject of the work of several photographers during her lifetime, including Lord Snowdon, Bern Schwartz, Mark Gerson, J. S. Lewinski and Tara Heinemann. == Death and legacy ==

, North Yorkshire Hawkes died in Cheltenham on 18 March 1996. However, their presence there is commemorated with a plaque on the church. Whilst Hawkes's views and writing may have been too "poetic" for the archaeological establishment, particularly in the context of processual archaeology's popularity in the later mid-twentieth century, Exhibitions Exhibitions inspired by Hawkes's life and works include: • Christine Finn: Back to a Land (2012), an exhibition at Yorkshire Sculpture Park by biographer and artist Christine Finn. • Pots Before Words (2014), an exhibition of work by artist Kate Morrell at the University of Bradford, explored Hawkes's archive. Morrell submitted work from this exhibition for the Jerwood Drawing Prize. • The Sun Went in, the Fire Went Out (2016), an exhibition by artists Annabel Nicolson, Carlyle Reedy and Marie Yates at Chelsea College of Art. • Isle of Wight: Hidden Heroes (2018), an exhibition at Carisbrooke Castle highlighting important people in the history of the Isle of Wight. == Selected works ==

Books • Hawkes, Jacquetta. Symbols & Speculations. Cresset Press, 1948. • Hawkes, Jacquetta. Man and the Sun. Cresset Press, 1963. • Hawkes, Jacquetta. A Guide to the Prehistoric and Roman Monuments in England and Wales 1951, revised 1973. • Hawkes, Jacquetta, and Sir Leonard Woolley. History of Mankind. Vol. 1. International Commission for a History of the Scientific and Cultural Development of Mankind, 1963. • Hawkes, Jacquetta. Pharaohs of Egypt. American Heritage Publishing Co., Inc., 1965. • Hawkes, Jacquetta. Dawn of the Gods. Chatto & Windus, 1968. • Hawkes, Jacquetta. The First Great Civilizations: Life in Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley and Egypt. Hutchinson, 1973. The History of Human Society series. • Hawkes, Jacquetta. Mortimer Wheeler: Adventurer in Archaeology. St Martin's Press, 1982. Articles • Hawkes, Jacquetta (1935). "The Place Origin of Windmill Hill Culture". Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society. 1: 127–9. • Hawkes, Jacquetta (1938). "The Significance of Channelled Ware in Neolithic Western Europe". The Archaeological Journal. 95 (1): 126–173. • Hawkes, Jacquetta (1941). "Excavation of a Megalithic Tomb at Harristown, Co. Waterford". Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland. 11 (4): 130–47. • Hawkes, Jacquetta (1951). "A Quarter Century of Antiquity". Antiquity. 25 (100): 171–3. • Hawkes, Jacquetta (1968). "The Proper Study of Mankind". Antiquity. 62: 252–66. ==References==