Gordon Hillman
Archaeobotanist who raised the profile of his discipline and co-starred with Ray Mears on Wild Food
GORDON HILLMAN, who has died aged 74, was an archaeobotanist (an expert in man’s use of plants through the ages) who became a familiar figure as the chinstrap-bearded travelling companion of Ray Mears on the five-part BBC Two series Wild Food, broadcast in 2007.
The series looked at strategies for the gathering, processing and storage of wild plants that were likely to have been available in the prehistoric Britain of the hunter-gatherers, and in the first episode, set in the Australian outback, viewers were treated to the sight of Mears persuading his more taciturn companion to sample a witchetty grub: “You don’t eat the head because it has hard mouth parts, for gnawing through roots.”
Other episodes featured the intrepid pair trying burdock porridge, crunching into sea kale roots and sipping the juice of the sea-buckthorn (“revolting,” said Mears). Hillman shed light on the leaves, roots, berries and nuts that people would have eaten (and the poisonous mushrooms they would have learnt the hard way to avoid), while providing something of an antidote to Mears’s romanticism about the quality of primitive life.
Before he came to wider public attention, Hillman had been a pivotal figure in the development of archaeobotany at the Institute of Archaeology at University College London, and through his research, publications and teaching had a major influence on the field worldwide. His enthusiasm, botanical knowledge and his extraordinarily imaginative mind led to new discoveries, particularly relating to the reconstruction of the origins of agriculture in the Near East. His research drew on extensive fieldwork, and on a command of German and Russian scholarly literature rare in Britain.
In particular, Hillman made fundamental contributions to the theoretical basis of archaeobotany, pioneering an approach that tied charred archaeological assemblages of grains, chaff and weed seeds to the stages of crop-processing involved in harvesting a cereal from the field and turning it into food. Work with traditional farming in Turkey led to the crucial insight that activities such as threshing and winnowing have characteristic effects on the composition of archaeological seed samples, revolutionising their interpretation.
He was thus instrumental in bringing archaeobotany out of the archaeological fringe and making it a central strength of the discipline.
In 2001, in an article written with colleagues in the journal The Holocene, Hillman argued that ancient man made the change from huntergatherer to farmer almost 2,000 years earlier than previously thought – not when the last Ice Age was easing off, as the traditional theory goes, but when it was getting colder.
After analysing 13,000-year-old food waste from Abu Hureyra, an archaeological site overlooking the Euphrates river valley in northern Syria, 80 miles east of Aleppo, Hillman argued that a sudden warm interlude towards the end of the Ice Age provided such an increase in food that Middle Eastern nomads were able to settle down for the first time in permanent villages.
Population growth increased dramatically, but after at least 1,000 years of settlement the climate deteriorated sharply, and with it the supply of wild food. As a result, to maintain their numbers and save themselves from starvation, communities were forced to manage and manipulate their food resources.
The researchers found that around 11,000 BC there were suddenly more remains of seeds of arable weeds. For a few decades, these were similar to wild seeds anywhere else. But within a century, fat-grained cereals, such as rye, which could only be selected and propagated by humans, had started to emerge.
By deliberately sowing the seeds every year, these first farmers unwittingly produced strains of cereal plants that could not thrive without continued human assistance. Once agriculture had taken hold, it was very difficult to abandon when climatic conditions improved, as they did 1,000 years later.
Gordon Charles Hillman was born on July 29 1943 at Hailsham, East Sussex, where his family had a long-established plant nursery. He developed his knowledge of British flora from a childhood spent running wild in the woodlands, marshes and downlands of the Sussex Weald.
After leaving school he worked as a field assistant on the Nature Conservancy Council’s Alston Moor nature reserve in Cumbria, followed by five years as an assistant science officer in the European herbarium of the Natural History Museum in London.
It was during his subsequent degree in Agricultural Botany at Reading University that Hillman became interested in the newly emerging subject of archaeobotany. After a year’s training with the pioneering archaeobotanist Maria Hopf in Mainz, he travelled to Turkey in 1970 to start his research, based at the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara.
There he participated in David French’s excavations at Aşvan, a village in eastern Turkey due to be flooded by the Keban dam. It was also during this time that he came to the attention of the archaeologist Andrew Moore, with whom he worked on the Abu Hureyra site and later published (also with AJ Legge) Village on the Euphrates: From Foraging to Farming at Abu Hureyra (2000). During his five years in Turkey Hillman built up a superb seed reference collection, an essential research resource now housed in Ankara and London.
Returning to Britain in 1975, Hillman became a lecturer in botany at University College Cardiff. Four years later he was headhunted by David Harris, Professor of Human Environment and later Director of the Institute of Archaeology, University of London. Here Hillman was to become lecturer then reader in Archaeobotany, and to train and mentor many students who now hold positions worldwide. He and Harris formed an effective team, editing a landmark volume on prehistoric subsistence, Foraging and Farming (1989).
Hillman retired early, due to ill health, in 1997, but continued his research as an honorary visiting professor at UCL. He was the author or co-author of more than 80 highly readable papers. As well as his work at Abu Hureyra, Hillman published on the late Paleolithic site of Wadi Kubbaniya in Egypt, and in conjunction with Ray Mears wrote a book to accompany the Wild Food television series. A volume of studies in his honour, From Foragers to Farmers, was published in 2009.
Hillman’s enthusiasm and skills as a communicator inspired many students to take up archaeobotany. He was absolutely committed to them, and was a master of the persuasive reference letter. He built lasting friendships worldwide, and his former students remain a tight-knit group.
He continued to work on a comprehensive compilation of wild plant foods of Britain until his death.
Hillman’s marriage to Wendy Maciness was dissolved. He is survived by a daughter.
Gordon Hillman, born July 29 1943, died July 1 2018