The Jacquetta Hawkes Archive
Jacquetta Hawkes
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. Her best-known work is probably "A Land" (1951), which fuses archaeology, literature, geology and art to explore Britain's past and present. She first married fellow archaeologist Christopher Hawkes; her second husband was J.B. Priestley, the Bradford-born novelist and playwright. Priestley's archive is also part of Special Collections.
Celebrating Jacquetta Hawkes: our blog created for her centenary in 2010, including an exhibition about her life.
Our 100 Objects exhibition tells many Jacquetta stories: her first and last digs, A Land, her work on the Festival of Britain, her relationship with Priestley, and her controversial views on the rise of processual archaeology during the 1960s.
Jacquetta Hawkes, 1937.
The Jacquetta Hawkes Archive
Archive reference: HAW
Jacquetta's Archive came to the University in 2003. It is an incredible record of her life. It includes diaries, letters, photographs, notebooks and drafts of books, poems, plays and articles, from her school reports and nature diaries to her last writings and obituaries. It vividly illustrates how Jacquetta developed as an archaeologist, journalist and poet, and covers her active engagement with controversial causes and her fascinating social and personal life.
Catalogue of the Jacquetta Hawkes Archive
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The Jacquetta Hawkes book collection
The Archive is supplemented by a comprehensive collection of Jacquetta's published books, articles and other writings. It contains works about her or otherwise relevant to the archive, and volumes from her own library.