was sponsored by the American Exploration Society of Philadelphia for a number of seasons—1901, 1903, 1904—and the results of her work were published in 1908. Harriet Hawes was not only the first woman to direct an excavation, she was also the first woman to publish her results.

Between 1900 and 1906 Hawes taught archaeology, epigraphy, and modern Greek at Smith College. She married and had two children and continued to publish and teach, first at the University of Wisconsin and then at Dartmouth College (1910–1917). After World War I she became assistant director (from 1919 to 1924) and then associate director (from 1924 to 1934) of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She taught at Wellesley College until 1936. In her later years she was more involved with international and U.S. politics than with archaeology, becoming an active New Dealer in Boston in the 1930s.

Tim Murray

Hawkes, Christopher

(1905–1992)

Hawkes was educated at Winchester and New College, Oxford. In 1928 he began working with the Department of British and Medieval Antiquities at the british museum as an assistant keeper. This position allowed him to develop an extensive overview of, and familiarity with, a wide range of material and artifacts. Hawkes was one of the national secretaries for the first International Congress for Pre- and Protohistoric Sciences (a forerunner of the International Union of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences) held in London in 1932, publishing, with archaeologist thomas d. kendrick, Archaeology in England and Wales 1914–31 and annual summaries of prehistoric research in Britain for the Archaeological Journal.

Hawkes came to archaeology through fieldwork, starting with sir mortimer wheeler in Wales, and then from 1924 to 1928 at St. Catherine’s Hill, Winchester, both excavating the chapel and establishing the Iron-Age date of the fortifications. He also worked at Wroxeter, and directed the excavations at Alchester, a small Roman town north of Oxford. From 1930 to 1931 he participated in the excavation of the Iron Age oppidia (or fortified town) of Camulodunum at Sheepen Hill, Colchester. Hawkes’s publication of this work firmly established his expertise in late Iron Age studies. In 1932 Hawkes joined the Fenland Research Committee, the first truly modern prehistoric project in terms of its interdisciplinary scope. He later endorsed gerhard bersu’s principles of excavation as practiced at Little Woodbury, and rejected Wheeler’s overreliance on section/sequence evidence, allying himself with the sociological school of open-area plan-recovery excavations.

Primarily concerned with the problems of protohistoric Europe, Hawkes’s archaeology was removed from the pure prehistory practiced by contemporaries grahame clark, stuart piggott, vere gordon childe, and glyn daniel. Situated at the cusp of history/prehistory, it was formulated with an awareness of the impact of past migrations, ethnic pluralities, comparative philology, and social stratification. For many, it was the weight given to the historic that ultimately limited Hawkes’s prehistory. His book The Prehistoric Foundations of Europe, to the Mycenean Age (1940) was both influential on, and comparable to, Childe’s Dawn of European Civilization, but he was entirely overshadowed by Childe. By the 1960s his advocacy of invasion theory and diffusionism was considered dated.

During World War II Hawkes worked in the Ministry of Aircraft Production. In 1946 he was appointed Oxford University’s first professor of European Prehistory. He was elected to the British Academy of Science in 1948. Hawkes established the Oxford Department of Archaeology and, in 1955, its Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art. Fluent in both French and German, along with Childe, Hawkes was one of the most “continentally” influential British prehistorians and was responsible for the integration of much British material with core European sequences. He retired in 1972.

Christopher Evans

See also

Britain, Roman

References

For references, see Encyclopedia of Archaeology: The Great Archaeologists, Vol. 1, ed. Tim Murray (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1999), pp. 476–479.