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Peter Ucko |
Peter John Ucko FRAI FSA (27th July 1938- 14th June 2007) was Professor Emeritus of Comparative Archaeology, former Executive Director of University College London's Institute of Archaeology, and most notable for his organisation of the first World Archaeological Congress in 1986.
Ucko was born in Buckinghamshire, his German father was a professor of medicine. He was educated at a boarding school and took his A-levels at the North Western Polytechnic in London before reading Anthropology at University College, London (UCL). He completed his Ph.D. thesis on prehistoric archaeology and Egyptology in 1962.
Ucko became a lecturer at UCL, editing two books, The Domestication and Exploitation of Plants and Animals and Man, settlement and urbanism that were widely accepted as standard works. His 1968 monograph Anthropomorphic Figurines of Predynastic Egypt and Neolithic Crete countered the Mother Goddess theories espoused by Marija Gimbutas, characterizing her interpretations as glib. He saw the figurines as sexless, unless they had unmistakable features like sex organs, breasts and beards, and he resolutely refused to see them as representations of deities, instead characterizing them as amulets of sympathetic magic, even children's toys. His views were highly influential on the succeeding generation.
Ucko accepted the post of Principal of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies in Canberra in 1972. In 1980 he advised the Zimbabwaean government on cultural resource management and in 1981 was appointed to succeed Colin Renfrew as professor of archaeology at the University of Southampton.
As a young man, Ucko was one of the very few white students at the North Western Polytechnic where he heard first-hand accounts of racism and discrimination. On entering the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies he found an organisation devoted to paying white people to study black people, and whilst working in Zimbabwe he saw how Ian Smith's government had manipulated archaeological evidence to support the racist regime. These experiences made him strongly anti-racist.
At Southampton, Ucko agreed to become National Secretary of the British Congress of the International Union of Pre- and Protohistoric Sciences which was to hold its next four-yearly meeting in England in 1986. At Ucko's urging, the Executive Board decided to follow the policy agreed by UNESCO and exclude South African and Namibian delegates because of the Apartheid regime in those countries. The archaeological community was split, leading to the foundation of the World Archaeological Congress. He wrote about the moral issues involved in his most personal work, Academic Freedom and Apartheid.
In 1996, Ucko was appointed to the post of Professor of Comparative Archaeology and Director of the Institute of Archaeology, University College London amidst a minor controversy based upon the fact that the post was not advertised. Ucko was headhunted directly from his post at the University of Southampton. Whilst Director, he actively endeavoured to turn the Institute into the forefront of world archaeology, with specialists working in virtually every region of the world, and joining anthropological and scientific approaches to material culture.
When he retired, in 2005, the Institute was the largest archaeology department in the world, with over 70 academic staff and more than 600 students from over 40 different countries. In his last year as a Director he secured appointments as lecturers for ten early career scholars, in spite of the financial deficit of UCL. This move consolidated his reputation as a scholar committed to empower minorities, regardless of race, age or gender, and as a master of the art of investing funding even if he did not have it.
"A Future for Archaeology", edited by Robert Layton, Stephen Shennan and Peter Stone, was published in 2006 as a festschrift for Ucko.
His last quest was the creation of the International Centre for Chinese Heritage and Archaeology, an institution devoted to promote the exchange of archaeologists between Europe and China, which has yielded several projects of collaboration in training and research, and a number of scholarships for Chinese students to be trained in archaeology at UCL.
He was a Fellow of both the Royal Anthropological Institute and the Society of Antiquaries.
Ucko died in London on 14 June 2007, leaving large numbers of international students, scholars and individuals who continue to regard him as a mentor and a great source of inspiration.
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