Occupation Archaeologist Education Winchester College Died March 29, 1992 | Role Archaeologist Name Christopher Hawkes Children Nicholas | |
 | ||
Full Name Charles Francis Christopher Hawkes Born 5 June 1905 ( 1905-06-05 ) Spouse Jacquetta Hawkes (m. 1933) Books Camulodunum: First Report on the Excavations at Colchester, 1930-1939 Similar People Jacquetta Hawkes, John Boynton Priestley, Frederick Gowland Hopkins | ||
Charles Francis Christopher Hawkes, FBA, FSA (5 June 1905 – 29 March 1992) was an English archaeologist specialising in European prehistory. He was Professor of European Archaeology at the University of Oxford from 1946 to 1972.
Contents
He was educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford, where he obtained first class honours in classics. He began archaeological work at the British Museum and was then appointed Professor of European Archaeology at Oxford in 1946. He was a Fellow of Keble College. He was awarded the Gold Medal of the Society of Antiquaries in 1981.
In 1933 he was married to Jacquetta Hopkins, but they were divorced in 1953. With Jacquetta Hawkes, he co-authored Prehistoric Britain (1937). He married Sonia Chadwick, also an archaeologist, in 1959. They jointly edited Greeks, Celts and Romans: studies in venture and resistance, 1973.
He was survived by his wife Sonia and son Nicholas.
Early life: 1905–
Hawkes' paternal family had been ironmasters in Birmingham, operating The Eagle Iron Foundry. His paternal grandfather Charles Samuel Hawkes moved to Beckenham in Kent with his seven children following the death of his wife; he later moved to South America, where he took a second wife. Hawkes' father was raised in Kent, before studying History at Trinity College, Cambridge from 1894 to 1897. He travelled to the Canary Islands, where he met a woman who was half-Spanish and half-English, and they subsequently married, resulting in Hawkes' birth. Being schooled in London, Hawkes inherited his father's fascination with past societies, influenced in this by the scenery of southern England and what he had read in the works of Rudyard Kipling. When the First World War broke out in August 1914, Hawkes' father volunteered to join several friends in the Special Reserve of the Northumberland Fusiliers; he brought his family to Northumberland with him, where Christopher encountered archaeological and historical monuments in the North-East, such as Hadrian's Wall and Durham Cathedral.
Personality
According to Brian Fagan, Hawkes was "a complex character" and "an ardent and extremely skilled typologist".