Peter Gathercole (1929–2010): A Life Well-Lived
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Matthew Spriggs,
The Australian National University
, Canberra,
Australia
Peter Gathercole, museum anthropologist, teacher, archaeologist, biographer of V.G. Childe and long-time supporter of the aims of WAC, died on 11 October in Kernow/Cornwall, UK. The funeral was held on 5 November in Cambridge, where his partner Bobbie Wells lives. A lifelong Marxist, it was Peter's undergraduate involvement with the Communist Party that brought him into early contact in 1949 with past WAC President, Jack Golson, at Cambridge University. They remained firm friends until Peter's death, both leaving the Communist Party in the 1950s as the contradictions of Stalinism became ever-clearer. It was Jack who encouraged Peter to switch to Archaeology from History for his first degree (awarded 1952). Peter had come to University after his military service in Egypt in the Royal Army Education Corps, while Jack had resumed his studies after conscription as a 'Bevin Boy' in the Nottinghamshire coalfields. Peter took out a Postgraduate Diploma at the Institute of Archaeology in 1954, studying under Vere Gordon Childe. It was Jack Golson again who encouraged Peter a few years later in 1958 to make the move to New Zealand to take up the second academic appointment created in archaeology in that country. Jack, in Auckland on the North Island in 1954, was of course the first such appointment. Peter quickly established the University of Otago in Dunedin on the South Island as the second great centre of archaeological teaching and research. The friendly rivalry between these two key New Zealand departments of anthropology continues to this day. Peter had started his post-degree professional career working at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery from 1954 to 1956, and before heading overseas had been the Curator of the Scunthorpe Museum and Art Gallery from 1956 to 1958. After his New Zealand interlude ended in 1968 he again took up his museums career at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, moving to Cambridge in 1970 as Curator of the University Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. During the rest of his career he produced numerous publications in the field of museum anthropology, often returning to consideration of Pacific and of course particularly New Zealand Maori artefacts and their meanings.
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After his retirement from the Museum in Cambridge, another career
change occurred as Peter became Deputy-Dean and then Dean of Students
of Darwin College, Cambridge from 1981 to 1987. Darwin is a graduate
college with a large proportion of overseas students, and Peters job was
the admission and pastoral care of all 300 of the student body. This was
really his metier and he was brilliant at it. I often meet former students
who remember him extremely fondly from that period of his life.
He retired from his Darwin Fellowship in 1996, moving down to
Cornwall, a place he had loved since being evacuated there as a St. Pauls
Cathedral chorister near the beginning of the Second World War. But there is
retirement and then there is retirement! Peter flung himself into active
involvement in the Cornwall Archaeological Society, its Journal long
behind schedule and struggling. From 1997 to 2000 he was President of
the Society and Editor of its Journal, continuing this latter duty until 2003.
In 2004 he was made Honorary Vice-President of the Society, having at
great personal effort got publication of its journal back on track.
Peters archaeological and museum publications span from 1955 until
his death left some papers still at the press. During this 55-year span he
produced several jointly-written or -edited books, over 30 contributions to
edited volumes, over 30 refereed journal articles and over 50 other articles,
reports and exhibition catalogues. He was a thoughtful and fair reviewer of
books, beginning with his review of J.S Weiners The Piltdown Forgery in
the Daily Worker for 17 February 1955. During his career about 100
reviews appeared under his name in various journals, particularly in
Antiquity and Pacific Arts, and in the Times Literary Supplement. As well as
Pacific material culture, he was the most penetrating of Childes biographers.
Although the long-promised synthesis of the great mans intellectual
history never eventuated, the series of papers by Peter on the topic from 1971
onwards are in many ways the last word on Childe.
In 19851986 Peter was a Visiting Lecturer at Southampton University,
teaching Peter Uckos courses while the latter concentrated on organising
what became the 1986 World Archaeological Congress. In his contentious
1987 book, Academic Freedom and Apartheid, Ucko talks of Peter as both
a source of comfort and of erudite understanding and stimulating
suggestions (p. 113), and at one particular turning point in discussions with the
then parent organization, the IUPPS, notes that Peter had sustained me
so often during the previous months (p. 121). Sadly, Peters
all-toounderstandable second thoughts about the way the Con (...truncated)