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Officiële naam: Hopkins, Jessie Jacquetta
Pseudoniemen en naamsvarianten: Hawkes, Jacquetta
Geboortedatum: 1910-08-05
Overlijdensdatum: 1996-03-18
Geslacht: female
Nationaliteit: UK
Geboorteplaats: Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England, UK
Plaats van overlijden: Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, England
Woonplaatsen: Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England, UK
Colchester, Essex, England, UK
Opleiding: University of Cambridge (Newnham College, Archaeology and Anthropology)
Beroepen: archaeologist
historian
Relaties: Hopkins, Sir Frederick Gowland (father)
Hawkes, Christopher (1st husband)
Hawkes, Nicolas (son)
Priestley, J. B. (2nd husband)
Organisaties: Post-War Reconstruction Secretariat
Ministry of Education
Prijzen en onderscheidingen: Society of Antiquaries of London (Fellow)
Korte biografie: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquett...

Jacquetta Hawkes, née Hopkins, was the daughter of Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist. In 1933, she married Christopher Hawkes, an archeologist and professor, then an assistant keeper at the British Museum. She attended Cambridge University and became an archeologist and scholar and a prolific writer, producing academic papers, children's books, guidebooks, complex works on ancient Egypt, Minoan, and Mediterranean civilizations, poetry, plays, and a novel. She also appeared on television and radio. In 1953, after a divorce, she remarried to J. B. Priestley. With Hawkes, she co-authored Prehistoric Britain (1943). With Priestley, she wrote Dragon's Mouth (1952) and Journey Down a Rainbow (1955). She was also the author of History of Mankind: Cultural and Scientific Development, Volume 1, Part 1 (1963) under the auspices of UNESCO, and The Atlas of Early Man (1976). Her best known book was A Land (1951). See a biography of Jacquetta Hawkes in Her Brilliant Career by Rachel Cooke.

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A Land door Jacquetta Hawkes

A remarkable book by a remarkable woman. Many years ago, I had an out-of-body experience where I rose above myself and located myself in time and space while I looked down on myself. Lying on back in her garden in London, Jaquetta Hawkes locates herself in time and space by sinking through the strata of the earth and through time. All important is William Smith's principle of stratigraphy, that the strata may be identified by the fossils they contain. So attuned is Hawkes to her sense of place that this journey through rock strata becomes an act of recollection, a memoir.
When she eventually rises to the surface she examines the ways in which the qulaities of various rock strata have shaped human history and conversley the way humans have shaped the earth.

...the centre of gravity of a people in any age may be expected to be found in the objects for which they will transport great quantities of building material.

She is not a fan of concrete.

...for it represents that terrifying new phenomenon, man mechanized and living cut off from his land, from the rock out of which he has come.

Hawkes develops notions of disconnection for more than half the book. There is an intelligence residing in stability that is constantly and relentlessly under threat.

The pressure of this life was always felt on the frontiers, and when at last it began to break in it was as if unconscious forces were reasserting themselves against the intellect.

By the 1950's, when this book was published, her world, her Britain, was being laid waste by a dystopian industrial era of complete disconnection that she glimpsed.

Who can ever express the desolation of these forlorn scenes? The grey slag heaps, the acres of land littered with rusted fragments of machinery, splintered glass, tin cans, sagging festoons of barbed wire, vile buildings, more vile in ruin; grimy stretches of cement floors, shapless heaps of broken concrete. The air about them still so foul that nothing more than a few nettles and tattered thistles will grow there; not even rosebay and ragewort can hide them with a brief summer promise. This is the worst that has happened to the land.

While she calls for the restoration of a mutilated Britain, she offers no practical way forward and instead draws together the threads of her narrative, back to her garden and to her place looking out from it. I couldn't help but wonder what she would have made of the communications revolution, the loss of language, identity, and the numbing sameness of thought that permeates the world today?
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simonpockley | 1 andere bespreking | Feb 25, 2024 |