Jacquetta’s concerns for the nuclear age continued to surface; in 1962 she published Man and the Sun, which was dedicated to two great friends, John Howard, who was her publisher at Cresset, and his wife Marghanita, better known as the avowed atheist, broadcaster, and writer Marghanita Laski.

The women had a warm friendship which must have been enlivened by a respectful intellectual sparring; Laski was a non-believer to the last, Hawkes’s religious conviction, at least, was avowedly non-institutional. The elements contained in Man and the Sun would have made for healthy debate.

Man and the Sun, like Man on Earth, is a work of passion, and of science coupled with imagination, which is controlled in the most part, but which breaks through as social concern by the end. What appears in prospect as a work of compilation, or an anthology on the theme of the sun in culture and nature, is really yet another means for Jacquetta to articulate her mission, her social campaign of international concern. Again, it is a subjective text, and features Jacquetta’s overflowing word-hoard of sensory delights.

Diana Collins suggests that the inspiration for Man and the Sun goes back to Jacquetta’s earliest childhood memories, which appear in her controversial semi-autobiographical work, A Quest of Love.

There Jacquetta writes: ‘How the sun glows behind our ash tree. A warm bath of light. I must run. Run in the sun bath…Face to the Sun, back to the sun. What joy all through…what joy’ she recalls. ‘I shared the glory of archangels before flopping down on the grass – I can re-experience that divine glow’.

The preface acknowledges another friend, the anthropologist, Laurens Van der Post whose Bushman story provides a cue to the theme through a creation myth about ants’eggs being dried by the sun. (When I began my research on Jacquetta, Van der Post wrote to me in reply to my enquiry, expressing great warmth about his friend Jacquetta Hawkes, and a willingnessto talk about her.. He died shortly afterwards, before we were able to meet. )

Another personal friend of the Priestleys, the Astronomer Royal Professor Fred Hoyle, is thanked for his guidance on the role of the sun in pueblo religion of the American South West.

Man and the Sun begins with a quotation from Copernicus ‘In the centre of everything is the sun…’. And the text starts with a descriptive setting, on the familiar theme of birds: ‘The yellow-hammer is the first. His little stutter followed after a pause by the single note, pure, sustained but rather too shrill, make the first mark upon the grey silence of earliest morning’ .

It is a cross-cultural and cross-temporal study of the sun, a form of primer with a nod to the synthesis of her earlier works. It allows her to return to a favoured archaeological subject, the pharaoh Amenhotep III, better known as Ahkenaten, whose short-lived reign (xx – xx) is remembered for its striking, and radically human, art forms, and a monotheism which revolved utterly around the Sun.. Jacquetta returned to his story in a novel, King of the Two Lands.

And again, as with A Land, having beguiled her reader with well-chosen fragments of solar fact and mythology, Jacquetta uses the text as a polemic.

The chapter themes invite the reader to consider the sun as benevolent – ‘The Sun of Life’, and to ponder its place in ritual - ‘Sun Father and Earth Mother’ . But Hawkes also uses the ancient Mexicans, the Aztecs, to warn of ‘the dark side of the psyche that is in all of us’ one which, in their case, caused them to perpetrate ‘the most dreadful deeds ever celebrated in religion’s name’. The corruption was such that ‘they enjoyed what they did’, she writes. But this is not an attack on religion, but rather a lack of it in her contemporary society; in an age led by science, it is another Hawkesian call for religious meaning. ‘Science is uniting man with the Sun in a totality of energy and matter. That is communion in the lowest level of being. But we have always been right to seek the highest.

In the last chapter, which concerns the sun of intellect, Jacquetta returns to the consequences of the Atomic Age. The sun we read of here is not that of happy summers, or ritual activity anticipating harvest. Here it is as bleak as it is bright: it is the fission bomb. ‘The processes of the H-bomb are those of the Sun’ she notes and we see this apparently benign book with gathers history and literature an science, is a further paean to her passionate politics.

The mathematical notation of the sun’s workings, included as an appendice, takes on a different shade entirely as Jacquetta takes her reader back to 1920s Gottingen, and the fusion scientists Atkinson and Houtermans walking in the warm sunshine, discussing light and heat. She summons recent history in the figures of Edward Teller, and President Truman, and she philosophises on the Marshall Island explosions, again with a note of foreboding: ‘Man’s first artificial sun rose above the Pacific, but it was not a star of peace…’.

Her rallying call, never far from the poetic, concludes with a note of unstoppable change in the midst of advancing wonder: “In this present year of AD 1962,” she writes, “three representatives of Homo sapiens have already seen the sun shining in the black skies of interplanetary space. The pace quickens.’

The book ends on a note of highly guarded-optimism: ‘Meanwhile the sun shines upon us in turn, the black and the white, the peoples of the East and the peoples of the West. There is just a chance it may awaken us to a good morning’.

The appendices which follow are a mixture of science and art: ‘Sun formula’ which gives the scientific notation for the processes continually maintained inside the sun, and is surely intended to remind the reader of the H-bomb process.

The Pharaoh Akhenaten’s Hymn to the Sun, a 12-stanza poem which includes the lines:

“You rise glorious at the heavens’ edge, O living Aten! You in whom all life began…’

Finally, ‘A Selection from the Emperor Julian’s Hymn to King Helios’ - ‘For I am a follower of King Helios…’- which relates to the cult of Mithras.

Meanwhile, the UNESCO volume ground on. relentlessly. The History of Mankind: Cultural and Scientific Development, Volume I, was finally edited by Jacquetta Hawkes and Sir Leonard Woolley, Prehistory and the Beginnings of Civilisation, 1963. Sir Leonard had discovered the great Mesopotamian site of Ur.

The story of the complex and convoluted publication of this volume is tied up with the story of archaeology itself. When first commissioned ten years before it was eventually published, Jacquetta and fellow editors faced the considerable challenge of providing a comprehensive picture of emerging civilisation across the span of human geography.

This was made even more challenging by developments in scientific archaeology which, led to data being constantly revised, cast-iron certainties re-evaluated, and the upshot being new ideas thrown into the pot for consideration. Jacquetta outlived her first two editors, and by all accounts found the publication one of the most exacting of her career.

Efforts to produce an accurate volume were superseded time and again by exciting new finds and theories arising out of the growing conviction in new science, in particular carbon 14 dating. This branch of atomic science gave Jacquetta cause for concern but this time as much from the academic standpoint; the problem was how to manage the revised reports, and then to weave a convincing history from them.

The vast amount of material relating to this volume which is contained in the archives at UNESCO in Paris attests to the demands of the job which, although given to Jacquetta as an honour, provided more trying with each passing year.

However, the 1963 volume, bears clues to another headache, the Byzantine process by which the editors’ final text reached endorsement in an age lacking even the remote possibility of email, one instead relying on the movement of official envelopes to the far-reaches of the globe.

The epilogue begins: ‘The original text of Jacquetta Hawkes and Sir Leonard Woolley was submitted to all the National Commissions for UNESCO and to a number of specialists selected by the international Committee for a History of the Scientific And Cultural Development of Mankind. All the comments which were made available to the International Committee and their original texts were communicated to the author-editors who used them widely in revising their manuscript.

‘The final revised text of volume one was entrusted to Professor H.G.Bandi, of the University of Berne, Switzerland, who was asked to prepare notes on major points at issue in order to complement the information in the manuscript or to summarise the thought of various schools on disputed questions. Prof.Bandi, in preparing the notes (translated by Ann. E.Kelp) utilised the comments of the team of 21 scholars. In addition, the comments and suggestions of the following scholars were made available to the International Commission through the National Commission for UNESCO in their respective countries (12 names are listed) and six other bodies sent observations which the International Committee acknowledges herein most gratefully.

‘Likewise, in the case of part II…’.

Notwithstanding this exhaustive editorial process, in her text Jacquetta upholds the innovation and breadth of this immense project, the intention of which was to bring evidence of the history of the whole cultural fabric of the world to be considered together.

‘This must be studied in one piece as representing early man’s energetic and intelligent, but essentially unscientific, struggle to control the natural world about him,’ she writes.

Indeed, the UNESCO file in Paris contains one quite unscientific addition to the many inches of official documents, revised manuscripts, and finally authorised texts.

As well as her academic archaeological work, Jacquetta was writing journalism for the Sunday Times and the Observer, and she and Jack tried a few collaborative pieces of treval writing: one attempt was entitled ‘Mr Pro and Mrs Con on a visit to Ceylon’ or words to that effect – and although it succeeded in parts, their agent could not place it and it was never published.

But Jack and Jacquetta were natural broadcasters, aware of the medium, not least through the experimentalism of Dragon’s Mouth. Fifty years before the wave of popular archaeology programmes which now grace the media, the BBC had a hit on its hands with an early archaeology programme called Animal, Vegetable or Mineral. It was blissfully simple by modern standards; a panel of distinguished guests had to pronounce on a mystery object. One of the other regulars on the team was the characterful and esteemed Indus archaeologist, Mortimer Wheeler, or ‘Rik’. Known as something of a ladies’man – a reputation rightly gained from his skill at luring attractive young woman to his excavation sites – he had earlier turned his sights on Jacquetta, flirting outrageously with her by all accounts.

Rumours abounded as to whether Rik – later Sir Mortimer - had succeeded in conquering Jacquetta. He might have thawed her to some degree, but Jack, it seems, had no cause to worry. Jacquetta quite liked Rik’s flamboyant gestures – Christopher had thoroughly disapproved of him – but she was not the sort to become one of ‘Wheeler’s Women’. She was taken enough with his personality to agree to write his biography some years later, and I doubt that would have been possible had she joined the ranks of his conquests. Not least, she openly, and flatly, denied it. Her Mortimer Wheeler: Adventurer in Archaeology was published in 1982, and well received, but Jacquetta did not enjoy the project particularly, not regarding herself as a natural biographer.

After the reasonable success of Providence Island, Jacquetta tried her hand an another novel. King of the Two Lands: the Pharaoh Akhenaten, was published in 1966, in both Britain and America, where Jacquetta had developed (and has retained) quite a following.

‘It seems all wrong for a novel to have a foreword…’, begins Jacquetta in King of the Two Lands, introducing the idea. ‘It is precisely because so considerable part of this story comes out of my head that my publisher and I thought I should do my best to distinguish between this and what is at least supposed to be true according to the latest interpretations’.

These latest interpretations of archaeologists and historians were not always flattering to the pharaoh and his wife, Nefertiti. Jacquetta notes the impression of one US historian, J.H.Breasted, that Akhenaten was ‘a God-intoxicated man’. This would not have been entirely derogatory for Hawkes, who at least was encouraged by a sense of belief. She goes on to maintain that Ahkenaten’s failure to retain control of Egypt was ‘due to a hatred of war and to his belief that all men were equally children of Aten…’, in effect he was failed fighting for exactly the causes with which she was engaged at this time.

Chapter one begins in Jacquetta’s typically sensuous style: ‘The boy hangs over the edge of the boat, unsuccessfully trying to reach the water with his finger-tips. The gilded gunwale cut into his thin ribs, and still his hand felt not water but only the heat of the sun’.

It is certainly not one of Jacquetta’s best-known works. Diana Collins contends the first part of the novel, which the author based on known archaeological material, was ‘beautifully done’ but regards the second as less successful; she makes something of a case for the defence in the face of evidence : ‘Present-day archaeology thinks poorly of Ahkenaten and Jacquetta herself is uncertain about this book’.

Even without the symbolism of the sun - a potent symbol to Jacquetta as seen from Man and the Sun - and the pharaoh’s apparent disdain for conflict, one can see how he would capture Jacquetta’s imagination. Akhenaten and Nefertiti appear to be an extraordinary, unconventional, couple, and more recent excavations at Tel-el Armana, the site of the pharaoh’s ‘experimental’ monotheistic city, have done little to dispel their enigma.

Jack and Jacquetta were always in demand. British Council lecture tours allowed them plenty of comfortable travel, and Jacquetta continued to record their trips with her camera.

But her world of archaeology was changing.Without an institution, Jacquetta had to work hard to maintain her humanist stance in the face of an increasingly scientific basis for her subject. As the UNESCO volume had shown, science was changing perceptions of origins and cultural movements, and she could not ignore the argument. She made her case in a controversial paper in Antiquity, called ‘The Proper Study of Mankind’, ands she made it plainly: ‘The scientific servant many be usurping the throne of history’. She gained her readers’ attention by using the stylish device of opening the paper with a reference to contemporary theatre, Harold Pinter’s great psychological drama, ‘The Servant’. Jacquetta wrote that she understood the desire of archaeologists ‘ to participate in the prestige of t he natural sciences’, but argued that archaeology was subjective. The crucial ‘difference between the values of archaeological and other types of scientific fact – accepting as a premise that archaeology exists for the service of history…the facts of biology, chemistry, physics are virtually universal and unchanging…one they have been checked by the experimental method they become part of an unchanging body of knowledge that can be used again and again.’ The evidence – the facts – of archaeology, she insisted - here showing prescience for the concerns of later 20th and early 21st century archaeology - were open to subjective inperpretation ‘relevant only to one particular fragment of history’.

‘The natural sciences have triumphed through analysis, through breaking down into smaller parts. Scientific archaeologists try to emulate them…For those of us who believe that history is an art and therefore concerned not with breaking down but with creating larger meanings these methods need constant checking and to be kept firmly in place’.

She regarded herself as partly a sceintist and so she did not oppose the new developments, and she was not opposed to modern technology per se – one thinks of the innovation used in Dragon’s Mouth - but her argument was for the appropriate employment of technology. What she opposed was ‘the relative neglect of the higher huuman achievements…Art and religion receive very little serious attention that is available in our world of archaeology.’

The article brought a tide of support. She wrote: ‘It is a long time since anything I wrote was greeted with such enthusiasm. I had letters of support from all kinds of people and from many parts of the world’.

In 1971, Jacquetta was invited to deliver the prestigious John Danz lecture at the University of Washington, and advanced within it her own theory against scientific reductionism. The lecture, entitled Nothing But or Something More, skilfully argued her own, very personal, corner: `Long ago I gave up a safe specialisation in prehistory to become the kind of generalist most widely deplored...I have advocated subjectivism in archaeological works; I have attacked statistics. I have denied that Stonehenge and other monuments are computers...' .

She was encouraged by support for her work from some interdisciplinary quarters: ‘It is probably right to see these genetically inherited mental forms as an accumulation from the past, but I want at the moment to disturb you by making a contrary proposition. It might be called sending up an intellectual balloon, or jumping in at the deep end. The proposition is that these things are given to us not by past aeons but as a process that is unrolling into the future. In other words, that our world, and heaven knows how many others, are involved in a development that can be likened by one of those dangerous analogies, to an egg developing into a man, an acorn into an oak, and so on.... I was delighted to discover that much of the interdisciplinary discussions at Alpbach were leading to this idea.... Provided we can prevent ourselves from destroying both ourselves and the world in which we live this could hold out wonderful possibilities for the human race. . . . Essentially all that I have tried to say to you is that we still inhabit a mystery, and that the best of scientific wisdom recognizes that this is so. Those scientists who live as whole and imaginative men do not believe that anyone has proved that their minds, their individual psyches are nothing but chance responses to chemical and molecular games played on the skin of the earth. The degraded masochism of this 'nothing but' does not represent a rational view of the universe. Let us have the courage to accept the inner experience that tells us that we are something more - and that we may be part of a process that is something much greater still.’ The lecture was first published privately in 1972, and then by the University of Washington.

[Nicolas Hawkes adds: "The reference to Alpbach is unsupported, and will perhaps mystify some readers; ie the Alpbach (Austria) Symposium, 1968, organised by Arthur Koestler (another significant figure with whom JH and JBP had links). The Chairman throughout was Dr W H Thorpe, a Cambridge near-neighbour and family friend, whose work in bird behaviour was often cited by 'nativist' and anti-reductionist Chomskyan linguists. Incidentally his daughter Margaret was my first-ever playmate! I was pleased to have had a role in Jacquetta's reading Beyond Reductionism, in that, as I was studying linguistics at the time, I knew about it and told her. She promptly bought the copy which I still have."]

Jacquetta was not against science, on which so many of her critics have based their claims. She accepted some of archaeology’s scientific advances – and was, after all, the daughter of a Nobel Prize-winning scientist. The 1973 edition of The Guide to Prehistoric and Roman Monuments of England and Wales acknowledged change in her new preface. 'Since this book was first published in 1951 interest in the remains of our past has probably increased'. The Guide was revised ' in light of excavation and research over the last twenty years' but also the increase in people going out to visit sites for themselves.

'On the whole it has stood the test of time remarkably well,’ she writes, ‘and the arrangement based on itineraries of an informal kind has, I believe, recommended it to tourists. With the additions that have now been made, I hope it will help a new generation of explorers..'

She noted the importance of the growth of archaeological rescue organisations to meet the threat to arch sites. 'Many minor earthworks have gone, or been spoiled by the ploughing of what used to be open downland, but finer, better preserved monuments figuring in this Guide have been well looked after.'

'For this reason revision has not meant removing names from the itineraries or gazetteer, but only expanding or correcting the histories of sites excavated since 1951 and adding new discoveries. There have not been many additions so spectacular as the great Roman palace at Fishbourne, but anyone who cares to check will find quite a number of interesting new entries.'

She concentrates her gratitude on one person: Dr.Julie Hanson. ‘I was left with little to do beyond the applications of stylistic oil to ease the additions into my own text. It is not often that one gets such faultless collaboration as hers'. Another archaeologist, Paul Bahn, helped Jacquetta with her final publication, The Shell Guide to British Archaeology, which was written when she was well into her 70s.

There were other books, many of them illustrated and aimed at the public rather than an academic audience. The Atlas of Early Man, a liberally illustrated work, published in 1976, is dedicated to Jacquetta’s step-daughter, Barbara Wykeham, ‘who first convinced me that people want a history to show “what happened at the same time as what”.’ She was assisted in this publication, which had both popular and academic appeal, by the archaeologist Donald Trump. Others were revisits to earlier subjects, such as The First Great Civilisations (1973) and Dawn of the Gods (1968), which dealt with Old World religious origins, and the foreword to a lavish edition of Homer’s Odyssey.

But over time, Jacquetta felt her voice was increasingly drowned by a new generation of archaeologists who believed in the primacy of science over art. As the mood of archaeology became ever-more scientifically rigorous and statistics-bound, Jacquetta's books were reviewed by a different market, and she began to lose ground, her views once seen as lyrical and engaging, now regarded as overly subjective. But, despite a sometimes lukewarm reception from traditional archaeologists, Jacquetta remained a distinguished figure to those who appreciated her unique perspective and writing ability. She maintained a loyal following and many of her books remained in print, or were coming out in new editions.

Given this, and her enduring presence at the Society of Antiquaries and other distinguished societies, Jacquetta could have retired quietly, mellowing into her last years with Jack who, considerably older, was slowing down; they knew time was slipping away on their extraordinary romance. But for one book, which many never forgave Jacquetta for writing. It was called A Quest of Love.

Perhaps Jacquetta felt it would be the last of her books that Jack would see, but the frankness with she describes their love and passion, in all its physical detail, distanced her from some readers while it fascinated others. Not least, within it she spoke of how wonderful life was with Jack, to the detriment of Christopher. She was adopting a more creative rein - imagining herself as a woman living through a number of centuries - but readily admitted that this book was as near to autobiography as anything she had written. Her frankness about her marriages and personal relationships, with both men and women, and the setting of the part-imagined historical framework divided critics. They were either fascinated or appalled. Diana Collins commented: ‘I gave A Quest of Love to a number of friends. Most found it enthralling, others had reservations, and some were worried by the autobiographical ending.’

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the book was readily dismissed by many archaeologists. A number of them had never forgiven her for what happened to Christopher; they thought she had written about herself overmuch already, and this time she had gone too far. Christopher, by now happily remarried to Sonia, was appalled by it, the reverberations from the final chapter continuing for several years.

Give the age gap between them, Jack and Jacquetta were braced for the eventuality of their intense partnership being broken by death. Jacquetta did not believe in anything beyond, and she saw Jack's passing, shortly before his 90th birthday on 14th August, 1984, as their final farewell. Diana Collins, whose own husband had died of a heart attack two years before, described how Jacquetta `held his hand, and then held him in her arms as quietly and peacefully he slipped away forever'.

A year later, Jacquetta sold Kissing Tree House and moved to Chipping Campden, a historic town not far away, in the Cotswolds. It was an elegant town house, close to the thick of things and Jacquetta became a familiar figure in the locality.

The move from Kissing Tree could not have been easy. Apart from the emotional strain of leaving the place where she had been so happy with Jack, her new home was considerably smaller with a quite different creative feel. I was fortunate to see it not long after her death. Jacquetta created a form of study area downstairs, where she continued to write on her familiar desk at her familiar typewriter. There was a further study and book room out the back of the house, leading to the small garden; its shelves completely were completey filled with voilumes and off-prints, and with more piled up on the floor. Her book collection, which comprised some of Priestley’s volumes as well as her own, continued all around the house, with shelves on landings and in bedrooms. Many had dedications. Her correspendence was unabated and her time filled; she continued to have the help of the trusty Miss Pudduck, Gertrude having already retired. When Miss Puddick retired in 1987, the search for staff began, as always, with an advertisement in The Lady.

Jacquetta was active in local groups, particularly the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust at Stratford-upon-Avon which now has a book room in her name. She supported other writers by attending book signings, and continued her wide range of interests. She remained a campaigner, against the `removal' of the prehistoric landmark, the Uffington White Horse, from Berkshire into Oxfordshire, and she was a supporter, also, for Homosexual Reform, a continuation of another minority campaign she had fought, on behalf of Australian Aborigines.

She continued to support local artists, and became particularly friendly with one young artist, Keith Grant, buying eleven of his works for the walls. He painted a large portrait of Jacquetta at this time, a not altogether flattering one, but it drew attention to her strong features, and her long hands. A copy of A Land is visible, a symbolic device as well as a figurative one. The whole painting has an almost surreal quality; certainly it has the neo-Romantic colouring of which Jacquetta was so fond. The portrait now hangs in the J.B.Priestley Library at Bradford, next to a display of Jack’s much-loved pipes.

Littlecote was a light and happy house, which in her own fashion, Jacquetta was determined to buy once she had seen it, and had her mind set. The house remained relatively harmonious despite its owner's increasingly difficult behaviour as she grew older and frustrated at her infirmity. One housekeeper left after another, apparently unable to keep up the high standards for living set at Brooke Hill and Kissing Tree, and before that even, at Primrose Hill and Newnham. It was as if, once alone, Jacquetta hoped to hold loss of Jack and her faculties at bay by returning to the isolating behaviour that had isolated her at Cambridge. Everything had to be correct, from the breakfast-tray, to the presentation of lunch, to the order of service at dinner. Sometimes he would sit alone in the dining room, with candles lit, formally dressed as though eating graciously at dinner with Jack.

Nicolas had continued to visit from his home in Edinburgh. After studying Classics at New College, Oxford, he had a career in educational work in Africa for idealistic reasons. If privately, as he learned mych later, Christopher had hoped his son would also become an archaeologist, this did not become an issue. Later Nicolas strove to succeed primarily in the full family life which had manifestly eluded his parents, rather than in academic achievement, in which they had each, in their different ways, been eminent. His first wife, Rosalind, had died young from cancer, in December 1989 (he much later remarried, to Peta, in 2004). Jacquetta maintained happy links with her two granddaughters, Camilla and Corinna, who had featured so highly in Jack and Jacquetta's later lives at Alveston.

Jacquetta Hawkes’s last book, The Shell Guide to Archaeology, was published in 1986. It was written with another prolific archaeology writer, Paul Bahn, who had studied at Cambridge and was one of a new generation of academic archaeology popularisers.

The book is a handsome and comprehensive volume, intended for a wide audience. It features many photographs, a number by Jorge Lewinsky, of whom she was fond and who had photographed her posed with an ancient Buddha head, an image now in the National Portrait Gallery’s collection.

The book is dedicated to Camilla and Corinna, her then-teenage grandaughters. It was ostensibly a guidebook. But ten years later Jacquetta's loyal readers could read its foreword and introduction as a form of swansong.

By the time of The Shell Guide's publication, Jacquetta had been a widow for two years. In 1986, she unveiled a statue to her beloved Jack in his home town of Bradford, West Yorkshire. She was still mentally active but losing her soul-mate had created an exhaustion which, although disguised as response to a complicated publication brief, was also a tiredness at being alone. At Chipping Campden she had time, too much time, to contemplate her life.

‘I am glad that this book is finished,’ she begins. ‘It has taken a long time to write and assemble – so my first thanks should go to the producers and publishers for their patience.

‘If I owe them thanks rather than apologies it is because this is, after all, an unusually ambitious work. In her way, Jacquetta is making an appeal for credibility in an academic age when her subjective view was no longer required reading.

She is in fact writing her own epitaph, creating a justifiable reminder of her own contribution to the field. She goes on: ‘The Introduction…is an exceptionally full survey of the archaeological background – which moreover has been kindly vetted for me by Professor Stuart Piggott.’ This nod to one of the old guard, a scholar in the mind of Christopher Hawkes, is a form of reparation.

And she manages to couple a modest comment with one which tackles a thorny issue relating to changes in her beloved old British landscape. She writes: ‘I want to thank Dr.Paul Bahn, who wrote almost the whole text of the Gazetteer (though I am to be praised or blamed for the selection of sites). I am also indebted to him for keeping me in order over the changing county names and boundaries, which to any one of my generation still seem strange and deplorable’. Hawkes, remember, had campaigned to keep the White Horse of Uffington in Oxfordshire, instead of its new administrative stable of Berkshire.

Jacquetta tackles another hobby horse in her concern about the reliability of Carbon 14 dating. And further, there was one other doubt where, she insists: ‘I must take the reader into my confidence’. It is one which returns her to earlier battles with ‘science’. This time she takes issue with the findings of Professor Alex Thom, who had advanced an application of advanced astronomical and mathematical knowledge in megalithic circles, stones, rows and menhirs.

It is major theme to take on in the foreward to a popular guide book, but Hawkes confidently states her case against Thom’s theory: ‘I am among those who cannot find this evidence by any means sufficiently reliable to overcome the extreme historical improbability that our illiterate and innumerate Stone and Bronze Age farmers possessed mathematical and astronomical genius unique for their time – that they could, for example, foretell eclipses of the sun. Undoubtedly they were deeply interested in the solstice and movements of the moon and the stars…But this depended on simple observation and does not imply a scientific approach that emerged only among the later Babylonians and the Greeks. One must follow one’s own judgement and so I have not included Dr (sic) Thom’s findings in our accounts of the megalithic monuments concerned. Those who wish to study them should turn to his Megalithic Sites in Britain: I warn them that it will make heavy demands of their mathematical understanding’. .

She makes this point again in the entry on Stonehenge. ‘It is quite possible that the circle was used for observations of the moon or major planets – but there is nothing to prove it’.

After so heating the intellectual water in her foreword, Jacquetta next asks readers for their understanding on a more practical theme: ‘If, just occasionally, they are inclined to curse Dr.Bahn and myself for leading them towards mud, bogs, barbed wire or monuments hidden in summer bracken, I hope they will feel such bad moments to be greatly outweighed by hours of added interest and enjoyment’.

Her introduction picks up her unbridled enthusiasm, with a return to a familiar topic: Britain and its archaeology. And so what would be her last book centres on the subject of those works which made her name, Prehistoric Britain, Early Britain, A Land, and running through these, the narrative spine of its ancient history. ‘No country in northern Europe has a richer inheritance of prehistoric and Roman antiquities than Great Britain,’ she begins ‘…the earthworks and stoneworks built by our early ancestors are exceptionally varied and yet tell a continuous story’.

And this last work also returns to the evangelical zeal with which Jacquetta engaged with archaeology from childhood. In this introduction, one recalls those early diggings in the garden in Cambridge which delivered little, but planted seeds.

‘Perhaps a few of those who start making such visits in the most carefree spirit,’ she writes, ‘may become so badly affected by the archaeological virus that they will want to study the subject in more detail – even, if they are sociable, enrol as excavators…so great is the glue of the past that many will be ready to seek out obscure earthworks or flock to dismal-looking excavations, wildernesses of holes and trenches, as soon as they hear that remains of the distant past are being dug up there.’

Jacquetta then revisits familiar territory to offer up, to mindful of a new set of readers approaching a new millennium, an important understanding of the past as inspiration, one which reasserts much about her own motivation: ‘I believe the appeal of ancient monuments has much in common with the emotion which most of us feel for the place where we spent our early childhood. We go to them to make contact with our origins, to be reminded how long our forebears have been baking bread, ornamenting themselves and their possessions, worshipping and caring for their dead. In that mood, and old shoe preserved by chance in slime will seem a wonderful object empowered to move us. The more we are uprooted, forced into the position of modern nomads, obliged to adapt to bewildering changes, the greater, it seems, is our longing for continuity and the sense of “belonging” that it brings’.

Writing in the 1980s, and after her years of broadcasting and popularising, she fully endorsed the role of the media in archaeology; she was entirely cogniscent of her own role in its enduring appeal. Validating archaeology’s potential for good, she adds: ‘..there is no doubt that a lively interest in our origins has become a part of modern life. It can be seen not only in the crowds of visitors…but in the popularity of books and television programmes on archaeology and, most of all, perhaps, in the hundreds, if not thousands, of men and women who devote their lives to the advancement of archaeology in universities, museums, and under the auspices of local authorities.’

However, regaining her balance in the text, Jacquetta attempts to re-educate her readership against the perils of over-popularisation. Again taking a familiar monument as a suitable case for treatment, she notes of Stonehenge Sanctuary: ‘…present day visitors often confess to disappointment. This response is largely due to the blighting effect of mass tourism…now visitors are barred from the temple area and get what impression they can from a distance. It may not be much comfort to frustrated visitors to know that a full reform of the present arrangement has been promised’

Then Jacquetta turns her criticism to a lack of imagination on the part of visitors, perhaps herself included, who were already besieged by modern expectations of the site. ‘Disappointment is also due to the fact that we are now all familiar with the scale of colossal buildings, hence the frequent plaint “Stonehenge is so small”.

‘One must try to imagine the small-scale human world of those who came too it at the time of its completion: to them the size of Stonehenge would have been as amazing as the first sight of Manhattan to pre-war Europeans’.

Chapter one, and Jacquetta’s last journey into prehistory begins not alone, but with a past-master, Aubrey, at her side.

In her later years it seems Jacquetta began to write a book about old age. I found fragments amongst the paperwork in her bookroom. In those few pages, she described her frustration at encroaching difficulty of movement and of being a person for whom such things as devices for the disabled were invented. She had a hip replacement, a private but unsatisfactory operation which left her in some pain, unhappy, and perhaps confused: in her last years she called doctors out for no apparemt reason. Sometimes she was even out when they called. This behaviour, of course, has to be put into context of old age, whether Jacquetta would have liked it or not. One could attempt to justify her often difficult ways throughout her life, her outward chilliness and aloofness, by suggesting that she was protecting her precious individuality against an audience of pragmatists. And then one is moved to justify her behaviour in old age, as that of a woman beset with loneliness, holding on to her firm convictions about finding balance. It took her 36 years to find a soulmate in Jack: with him she had concluded her quest of love.

Jacquetta Hawkes died in hospital at Cheltenham on 18th March, 1996; the cause of death was simply old age. Her ashes were buried close to Jack's next to the ancient church at Hubberholme, in his beloved Yorkshire Dales. Although she shared the blame for the break-up of her marriage to Christopher Hawkes, Jacquetta felt her finding of, and love for, Jack Priestley, reflected a need from the deepest part of herself. `And for heaven's sake', she called on her detractors, `let me behave badly in order to fulfil it'.

Return to Home