Peter John Ucko FRAI FSA (27 July 1938-14 June 2007) was an influential English archaeologist, noted for being the Professor Emeritus of Comparative Archaeology and also the former Executive Director of University College London's Institute of Archaeology. He was also noted for his organisation of the first World Archaeological Congress in 1986. Another of his significant parts that he played in archaeology was, according to one obituary, to "take archaeological issues to groups not normally involved in the discipline - such as indigenous communities around the world".[1] He was a Fellow of both the Royal Anthropological Institute and the Society of Antiquaries.
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Ucko was born in London, and his German father was a professor of endocrinology whilst his mother was a child psychologist.[2] He was educated at a Bryanston School in Dorset, a boarding school and later took his A-levels at the North Western Polytechnic in London before reading Anthropology at University College, London (UCL). He completed his Ph.D. thesis on anthropomorphic figurines of the ancient Near East, particularly those of Egypt in 1962, and was considered by many to primarily be an Egyptologist.[3]
Ucko became a lecturer at UCL, editing two books, The Domestication and Exploitation of Plants and Animals and Man, Settlement and Urbanism, that were widely accepted as standard works. His 1968 monograph Anthropomorphic Figurines of Predynastic Egypt and Neolithic Crete countered the Mother Goddess theories espoused by Marija Gimbutas, characterizing her interpretations as glib. He saw the figurines as sexless, unless they had unmistakable features like sex organs, breasts and beards, and he resolutely refused to see them as representations of deities, instead characterizing them as amulets of sympathetic magic, or even children's toys. His views were highly influential on the succeeding generation.
In 1972, Ucko accepted the post of Principal of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies in Canberra, where he countered then-racist trends by appointing Australian Aborigines to the council.[4] In 1980 he advised the Zimbabwaean government on cultural resource management and in 1981 was appointed to succeed Colin Renfrew as professor of archaeology at the University of Southampton. At Southampton, Ucko agreed to become National Secretary of the British Congress of the International Union of Pre- and Protohistoric Sciences which was to hold its next four-yearly meeting in England in 1986. At Ucko's urging, the Executive Board decided to follow the policy agreed by UNESCO and exclude South African and Namibian delegates because of the Apartheid regime in those countries. The archaeological community was split, leading to the foundation of the World Archaeological Congress. He wrote about the moral issues involved in his most personal work, Academic Freedom and Apartheid.
In 1996, Ucko was appointed to the post of Professor of Comparative Archaeology and Director of the Institute of Archaeology, University College London amidst a minor controversy based upon the fact that the post was not advertised – Ucko had been chosen directly from his post at the University of Southampton. Whilst Director, he actively endeavoured to turn the Institute into the forefront of world archaeology, organising an overhauling of the former syllabus, in particular changing the undergraduate curriculum which "largely anticipated the benchmark archaeology curriculum developed nationally shortly afterwards".[5]
In later years, he helped to forge greater links with archaeological departments in the People's Republic of China, and in 2006 travelled to ten different Chinese cities to interview academics about how they taught archaeology - he had a plan to write a book about this, but this never materialised.[6] He helped to found the International Centre for Chinese Heritage and Archaeology, an institution devoted to promote the exchange of archaeologists between Europe and China, which has yielded several projects of collaboration in training and research, and a number of scholarships for Chinese students to be trained in archaeology at UCL.
Ucko retired in 2005, leaving the Institute as the largest archaeology department in the world, with over 70 academic staff and more than 600 students from over 40 different countries. In his last year as a Director he secured appointments as lecturers for ten early career scholars, in spite of the financial deficit of UCL. This move consolidated his reputation as a scholar committed to empower minorities, regardless of race, age or gender, and as a master of the art of investing funding even if he did not have it.
Future for Archaeology, edited by Robert Layton, Stephen Shennan and Peter Stone, was published in 2006 as a festschrift for Ucko.