Hawkes, (Charles Francis) Christopher (1905-1992)

British archaeologist. A pioneer in the study of the prehistoric periods of Europe, he helped to found international prehistory as a discipline in Britain in the late 1920s and early 1930s. His writings have been extremely influential and include The Prehistoric Foundations of Europe 1940.

Hawkes was a skilled excavator, whose work on Iron Age sites such as the hill fort of St Catherine's Hill and at Colchester often surpassed the standards of his contemporaries. He particularly specialized in the European late Bronze Age and early Iron Age, complex and formative periods that witnessed the interaction of primitive communities with classical civilization. He focused on the problems of cultural change, and on the continuity between late prehistory and early civilization in Europe; for example, in the Celtic tradition.

Hawkes was professor of European archaeology at Oxford. His interest in the application of scientific techniques to archaeological material led in 1955 to the creation of the Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art at Oxford.

Hawkes also made an important contribution to archaeological theory and the debate about the nature of archaeological evidence, insisting as early as 1954, in the journal American Anthropologist, that there existed a ‘ladder of inference’ - that is, one could safely use archaeological evidence to reconstruct the simpler and more material aspects of past societies - but that there were clear limitations on the amount of information about beliefs or social structure that could be inferred from these mute remains. This view has been criticized by some archaeologists, such as the US archaeologist Lewis Binford (1930- ), who argue that all aspects of sociocultural systems are reflected in the archaeological record.

Hawkes's publications include Archaeology in England and Wales 1914-31 with T D Kendrick 1932, Prehistoric Britain 1943 with Jacquetta Hawkes (1910-1996), Camulodunum, The Excavations at Colchester 1930-39 with M R Hull 1947, and Celtic Art in Ancient Europe 1973.