Peter Ucko

Peter Ucko was born in Buckinghamshire[1]^: 1 on 27 July 1938 to German Jewish parents.[2] His father was a professor of endocrinology who took a great interest in music, conducting orchestras and organising operas, while his mother was a child psychologist.[2][3] He formed an 'unwavering obsession' with Egyptology at the age of eleven.[1]^: 1 He was sent to boarding school at Bryanston in Dorset, which he despised and left after displeasing the school authorities by refusing to play in a tennis double's match with a local girls school.[2][3]

Studying for a year at North West London Polytechnic, he completed his A-levels and met a number of students from developing countries, developing his staunch anti-racist views.[2][3] From 1956 to 1959, he studied for an undergraduate degree in anthropology from University College London (UCL), opting for courses that focused on archaeology. Remaining at UCL, in the Institute of Archaeology, he proceeded to study for a PhD in the anthropomorphic figurines of the ancient Near East, under the supervision of John Evans, completing it in 1962.[2][3][1]^: 2 Having placed a particular emphasis on Ancient Egypt, he came to be seen as an Egyptologist.[4]

Ucko worked in the UCL Department of Anthropology for the next decade, founding the School of Material Culture Studies. He organised two academic conferences there, which subsequently led to two edited volumes: The Domestication of Plants and Animals and Man, Settlement and Urbanism, both of which became "standard texts."[2][3] In 1967 he published Palaeolithic Cave Art, a book co-written with his girlfriend Andrée Rosenfeld, while the following year he published his doctoral research as a monograph titled Anthropomorphic Figurines of Predynastic Egypt and Neolithic Crete, which critiqued the claims regarding mother goddesses that had been popularised by Marija Gimbutas.[2]

In 1972, he was appointed Principal of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies in Canberra, Australia, negatively characterising it as an institution where white people were paid by white people to study black people.[1]^: 2 Overseeing a rapid expansion, he sought to involve Indigenous Australians in the project, hiring them in the council and its committees and launching a project known as "Before It Is Too Late" to preserve indigenous culture and language. He left in 1980, largely because of his dislike of fundraising, which was a major part of his role,[1]^: 14 insisting that his position be taken up by an Indigenous individual.[2] Ucko was succeeded in the position by Eric Willmot, an eminent indigenous academic and engineer hailing from Cribb Island, Queensland.

In May 1981, following a spell of consultancy work for the Zimbabwean government, he was appointed Professor of Archaeology at the University of Southampton in England; he took up the position, left vacant by Colin Renfrew, in January 1982.[1]^: 3, 8 Pioneering new teaching methods, from 1993 to 1996 he was appointed Dean of Arts at Southampton, allowing him greater space to institute reform.[3]

Becoming national secretary of the International Union for Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences (IUPPS), Ucko was charged with organising the organisation's eleventh congress, which was due to take place at Southampton University in 1986. Beginning preparations in 1984, he decided to abide by the international academic boycott of South Africa and Namibia, which had been implemented to protest the apartheid system in those countries; this meant that South African and Namibian delegates would be prevented from attending the congress. The decision caused controversy in the international archaeological community and raised questions of academic freedom. Senior figures in the IUPPS argued that the congress must be open to all archaeologists "with no distinction of race, country or political persuasion", a position supported by the Society for American Archaeology.[2][3] After IUPPS disavowed the conference, Ucko continued to stage it under a new banner as the World Archaeological Congress (WAC), thus developing a new international organisation committed to "the explicit recognition of the historical and social role, and the political context, of archaeological enquiry", which grew to become larger and more influential than IUPPS.[2]

The entrance to the IoA.

In 1996 he was appointed Director of the UCL Institute of Archaeology in central London, also taking on the role of Professor of Comparative Archaeology. His appointment to the former was not universally popular.[3] His later successor as director, Stephen Shennan, would comment that Ucko went about his job "with characteristic forcefulness, making new appointments, overturning existing structures and overhauling the syllabus at all levels."[3] Ucko immediately implemented changes to the manner in which undergraduate courses were taught, based on his experiences at Southampton. Bringing in compulsory core courses for second and third years on such subjects as archaeological theory and public archaeology, he focused on generalisation at the undergraduate level, reserving specialisation for those students who went on to study at a master's degree level, expanding the number of master's degrees on offer.[5]

Taking a particular interest in the fields of public archaeology and cultural heritage studies, he appointed new staff members to teach courses in such topics, and was involved in founding the Public Archaeology journal, initially edited by honorary lecturer Neal Ascherson.[5] Keen on increasing the IoA's publishing output, he oversaw the creation of Archaeology International, a journal that first appeared in 1998, combining the roles of the former Bulletin of the Institute of Archaeology and the Annual Report, edited by David R. Harris.[6] After Cavendish Press, publishers of the UCL Press imprint, were bought out by Taylor and Francis, Ucko initiated successful talks with Left Coast Press for the IoA to publish future works through them.[6] He also emphasised the importance of the artefact collections owned by UCL and IoA, believing that they had great potential as teaching aids and for public outreach.[5]

Having developed a keen interest in Chinese archaeology, he helped to forge greater links with archaeological departments in the People's Republic of China, and in conjunction with the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) created two joint teaching positions in Chinese archaeology.[4][5] In co-operation with the School of Archaeology and Museology at Peking University, he helped UCL found the International Centre for Chinese Heritage and Archaeology (ICCHA), an institution devoted to promoting the exchange of archaeologists between Europe and China. Appointed director of ICCHA, it soon yielded several collaborative projects in training and research, and resulted in a number of scholarships for Chinese students to be trained in archaeology at UCL.[2][5] Ucko retired from the position of director in 2005, at which time the UCL-IoA had become the world's largest archaeology department, with over 70 academic staff and 600 students from 40 countries.[2]

Following his retirement, Ucko focused his attention on continuing dialogue between archaeological communities in the UK and PRC.[3] In 2006 he travelled to ten Chinese cities with colleague Wang Tao, interviewing academic archaeologists about how they taught the subject; he planned to produce a book on this topic, but had not done so by the time of his death.[4] A festschrift titled A Future for Archaeology, edited by Robert Layton, Stephen Shennan and Peter Stone, was produced in Ucko's honour in 2006.[2] Ucko had chronic diabetes, a condition that contributed to his death on 14 June 2007.[3]