Jacquetta Hawkes, archaeologist and writer

Jacquetta Hawkes (1910-1996) had an immensely rich and varied life, motivated by her passion for the distant past. She was a highly respected archaeologist, a writer of poems, plays and articles, a film-maker and broadcaster and peace campaigner. She published over 20 books, her best-known work is probably A Land (1951), which fuses archaeology, literature, geology and art to explore Britain's past and present. Other works included Prehistoric Britain (co-written with Christopher Hawkes), Early Britain, Man on Earth and Man and the sun, plus novels, plays and Fables.

Jessie Jacquetta Hopkins was born in Cambridge and educated at Perse School. Her father was Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins, Nobel Prize winner for his work on vitamins. She was accepted at Newnham College, Cambridge, gaining first-class honours in the new archaeological tripos. Her first husband was fellow archaeologist Christopher Hawkes, with whom she had a son. During the 1930s, she was involved in excavations at Mount Carmel, Palestine, Gergovia in France, and in Hampshire, and led a dig in County Waterford in 1939.

During World War II, she worked as a civil servant. She met the writer J.B. Priestley at a UNESCO delegation in Mexico in 1947; they married in 1953. They co-wrote two plays, Dragon's Mouth and The White countess, and philosophical travel book, Journey down a rainbow, which discussed society in Mexico and the United States. Jacquetta was archaeological advisor to the Festival of Britain, for which she received the O.B.E. in 1952. With Priestley, she was instrumental in the founding of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1958. In 1959, the Priestleys made their home at Kissing Tree House, Alveston, Warwickshire. Their extensive circle of friends included Canon and Diana Collins, Iris Murdoch, Henry Moore, and other archaeologists, writers and artists. After Priestley's death in 1984, Jacquetta moved to Littlecote in Chipping Camden, Gloucestershire. Her final published book was The Shell Guide to British Archaeology in 1986. She died in 1996.