Sir Mortimer Wheeler

Extract

Sir Mortimer Wheeler towers over twentiethcentury archaeology like a colossus. One of the last of the great archaeological adventurers, Wheeler has left a mark on our discipline that shows no sign of diminishing even as immediate memories of his long life fade into history. A biography of this extraordinary, almost heroic, figure was inevitable, and sure enough it has appeared. Jacquetta Hawkes’s Mortimer Wheeler: adventurer in archaeology arrives just six years after his death; far too soon for a really dispassionate assessment. Hawkes has been careful to compile a life, not a hagiography. She has avoided the pitfalls of a cult book, such as those devoted to other well-known figures in recent years. Wheeler would never have approved of groupies nor of a cult, for he was only too aware of his own imperfections. Nevertheless, he emerges from Hawkes’s biography as rather larger than life. ‘Mortimer Wheeler will rise from these pages as a Hero figure’, Hawkes disarmingly admits at the beginning. She undertook the daunting task of sifting not only through piles of dusty notes and archaeological field notes, but through peoples’ opinions of the man that varied from unqualified hero-worship to virulent hatred. What is remarkable is that his detractors were also admirers of his energy and vitality. Hawkes is refreshingly honest about her own feelings for Wheeler. She had ‘a very great liking’ for him. She enjoyed, she tells us, ‘his company, his talk, his power to brighten the day.’ She had the disadvantage of never having worked with him, which she describes, probably accurately, as ‘a terrifying as well as immensely profitable’ experience. Her well written, enjoyable biography paints Wheeler as a form of epic character, one of the last people to belong in the heroic age of archaeology.