Peter Gathercole (1929–2010): A Life Well-Lived

Abstract

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. O B IT U A R Y