Jacquetta Hawkes
| Jacquetta Hawkes | |
|---|---|
| Born |
5 August 1910 Cambridge |
| Died | 18 March 1996 (aged 85) |
| Occupation | Writer and archaeologist |
| Nationality |
British 
|
| Period | 20th century |
Jacquetta Hawkes (5 August 1910 – 18 March 1996) was a British archaeologist and writer.
Born Jessie Jacquetta Hopkins, the daughter of Nobel Prize-winning scientist Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins, she married first Christopher Hawkes, then an assistant keeper at the British Museum, in 1933. From 1953, she was married to J. B. Priestley. She is perhaps best known generally for her book A Land (1951). She was a prolific writer on subjects quite removed from her principal field. She was above all interested in discovering the lives of the peoples revealed by scientific excavations. With Christopher Hawkes, she co-authored Prehistoric Britain (1943) and with J. B. Priestley she wrote Dragon's Mouth (1952) and Journey Down a Rainbow (1955). Her other works include The World of the Past (1963), Prehistory (History of Mankind: Cultural and Scientific Development, Volume 1 Part 1) (1963) prepared under the auspices of UNESCO, The Atlas of Early Man (1976) and The Shell Guide to British Archaeology (1986).
Hawkes was the first woman to study archaeology and anthropology at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she graduated with first class honours.
In her general work on the Minoans (Dawn of the Gods, 1968), Hawkes was also one of the first archaeologists to suggest that the ancient Minoans might have been ruled by women; the idea had been discussed long before by historians of culture and religion (for instance, Joseph Campbell), and outside of the academic community, sometimes by feminists. Hawkes noted that very little if any evidence of a Minoan male ruler exists, whereas abundant evidence of such rulers existed among the Egyptians, Hittites, Assyrians and other Minoan contemporaries. Furthermore, images of strong and powerful women abound in Minoan art, where both men and women are shown provocatively and elegantly dressed and in some pictures seem to move on equal terms; whereas in Egyptian, Assyrian and classical Greek art, human women (as distinct from goddesses) are never shown as the equals of males. Hawkes stated that "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" (Dawn of the Gods, page 76).
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