Peter John Ucko 1938-2007

Peter Ucko, who recently died aged 68 from complications brought on by diabetes, was first attracted to Australia by our teacher, Phyllis Kaberry, at the Anthropology Department at University College London (UCL). One of my first memories of Peter dates from around 1964, when I was a young undergraduate student and Peter a junior lecturer. Phyllis was canvassing student opinion of some aspect of the degree program when Peter rushed past, hurtling down the stairs. Phyllis grabbed him by the arm, saying: 'Let's ask a bright young lecturer what he thinks, shall we?' From the start of his ca reef, Peter Ucko promoted the value of interdisciplinarity. His Doctorate, on Prehistoric human figurines from Western Asia and the Aegean, relied on comparative evidence from anthropology to dispute the common assumption that figurines were typically associated with fertility cults. Peter rejected piecemeal ethnographic parallels and instead sought to develop a systematic approach to correlations between social function and archaeological context. On completion of his Doctorate in 1962 Peter returned to UCL to organise the teaching of material culture in the Anthropology program, as part of the vision of the Head of Department, Daryl Forde, for a four-field approach to the subject. Peter dismantled any tendency his students might have to think that the term 'primitive' implied 'inferior', or that farmers inevitably followed hunters in a simple story of unilinear progress. His genius for organisation became apparent in the development of landmark conferences on The Origins of Domestication and Urbanisation in the early 1970s, and flowered during his transformation of the Institute. Peter's early academic publications broke new ground in the study of material culture--penis sheaths, funerary remains, rock-art. His World University Library book on Palaeolithic rock-art (1967, co-authored with Andree Rosenfeld) drew on ethnographic evidence from Australia, inaugurating the contacts that would lead him to be appointed as Principal of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies in Canberra in 1972. Invited to apply for the position by the Institute chairman, NWG Macintosh, Peter may finally have been swayed by an incident during a public lecture. He had responded to an invitation from the Horniman Museum in south London to contribute a talk on Aboriginal Australia to the Museum's public lecture series. When the chair called for questions (as Peter related the following day), an elderly woman in the audience stood up and announced querulously, 'My name is Simpson.' 'And what is your question?' Peter asked. 'Well, young man, the Simpson Desert is named after my father and I know Australia well ... when were you last there?' Unwilling to reveal he had never been to Australia, he deflected the question by asking when the woman had last been there. Upon learning that she had not been in Australia since she was a girl, Peter dismissively called for the next question. He could not, however, ignore this challenge to his academic integrity! The Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies had been established in 1961 with a remit to collect, what was assumed to be, the last vestiges of Aboriginal culture. Its brief explicitly excluded study of the contemporary condition of indigenous communities, for fear these might jeopardise both the government funding on which the Institute depended and anthropologists' future fieldwork at a time when access to Aboriginal communities was tightly regulated by government or church agencies. Peter was committed to improving the quality of research at the Institute and, while he arrived with the intention of promoting collaboration between Aboriginal peoples and academic researchers, he probably failed to appreciate at that time that Aboriginal communities had strong views on the value, need and ethics of academic research. Soon after his arrival at the Institute, Peter organised a multi-disciplinary conference, developing the model of those he had organised at the Institute of Archaeology in London, but quickly came under attack from Aboriginal activists for not redirecting research toward contemporary, practical issues. …