Caroline Wickham-Jones obituary
Caroline Wickham-Jones, who has died aged 66 from amyloidosis, was an outstanding archaeologist and communicator of her subject. Choosing Orkney as her home, she researched the changing island landscape and the earliest peoples who made their lives across Scotland. She described her results in many academic publications, but also to a wider and appreciative audience, through lecturing, tours, books, a magazine column, a blog and an award-winning radio series.
Her special interest was the time when hunter-gatherers populated what is now Scotland, between the end of the ice age some 12,000 years ago, and the disruption of their world by the arrival of farmers 6,000 years later – the final Palaeolithic and Mesolithic ages. She tracked evidence for these people that was both older than anything seen before (when she began, signs of hunter-gatherers at any time were scarce in Scotland), and in new places. Most notable among the latter was the bed of the North Sea.
In 1981 a piece of flint turned up where it should not have been, in a British Geological Survey sample collected between the Shetland Islands and Norway. Wickham-Jones identified it as an artefact, and her immediate reaction was that it must have been dropped from a boat by its prehistoric owner. It soon transpired, however, that that part of the North Sea was land at the end of the ice age, when glaciers trapped large volumes of water and global sea levels were lower than now.
She judged the chances that geologists had found a lone flint too small to consider, and proclaimed it to have been hauled up from a campsite. Twenty years before the rediscovery of the now famed Doggerland further south, to enter Mesolithic Britain archaeologists now needed not just to imagine different lifestyles: WickhamJones made it clear we had to conjure unmapped lands too.
Caroline was born in Stocktonon-Tees, County Durham. Her father, Charles Wickham-Jones, was an industrial chemist and charity worker; her mother, Prim (nee Bayliss), had been a nurse. Caroline’s love for Orkney began early, sparked by a collection of postcards her grandmother had kept while stationed there in the first world war. Fascinated by these as a child, Wickham-Jones persuaded her parents to holiday in the islands in 1972.
The following year she went back as an archaeology student at the University of Edinburgh, and again when taking a master’s in heritage management at the University of Birmingham – to excavate at Skara Brae and other Neolithic (early farming) sites, and codirect her own dig. Years later she would help to establish research priorities for the new Orkney World Heritage Site.
In the 1980s she found what was then the oldest known settlement in Scotland, at Kinloch on Rum. From 1998 she co-directed a project seeking evidence for hunter-gatherers among mounds of seafood waste on the Scottish west coast. She moved permanently to Orkney in 2002, and from 2005 collaborated on a project that explored its changing coasts and looked for drowned settlements.
Most recently she led fieldwork in Aberdeenshire, where a voluntary community group walked fields beside the River Dee, finding thousands of tiny flint tools and manufacturing waste, and mapping a history of hunter-gatherers exceptional both for its duration and its scale.
Throughout such research she attended to wider themes, with books such as The Landscape of Scotland: A Hidden History (2001) and Scotland’s First Settlers (2002). Fear of Farming (2010) pictured the loss of a huntergatherer existence as a “catastrophe”, but one that modern society could overcome (a concern with the contemporary world first shown in 1992, in her co-edited book All Natural Things: Archaeology and the Green Debate).
Orkney: A Historical Guide (1998), aimed at “those who visit Orkney” – in her telling of migrations, missionaries and earls, those visitors included everyone who ever lived there as well as tourists – became a popular read, along with her guidebooks for Historic Scotland. Before starting her blog in 2015, she wrote a column for British Archaeology magazine about online archaeology.
Writing was only the half of it. For a decade from 2007 Wickham-Jones was lecturer in archaeology at the Univer
sity of Aberdeen, hosting online teaching from Orkney in a popular style that blossomed into public talks and tours, from Orkney to far-flung ship cruises. In the winters she presented Orkyology, a monthly radio show for BBC Scotland that jointly won the British Archaeological press award.
The author Margaret Elphinstone came to stay – Wickham-Jones was widely known as a generous and entertaining host – to research her novel The Gathering Night: they described the experience as being each other’s interpreter, the archaeologist seeing her ideas reach a new audience, and the novelist learning about hunter-gatherer ways.
Those ways, thought WickhamJones, were peripatetic, and she was herself fond of travel, always making new friends. In 1988 – a year before the Tiananmen Square massacre – she took the Silk Road, flying out to Pakistan with a small tour group and returning on her own by train from Beijing, stopping for a week in Ulaanbaatar and another in Moscow. On one of her many trips to South America, in 1993, she met Alejandro Lopez, a Chilean jeweller. They had a son, Guille; their marriage was brief and Guille grew up in Scotland. In 2006 she took him out of school for a term, and they spent three months together away from Orkney in Argentina and Chile, taking in Tierra del Fuego and Easter Island.
In her last blog, posted eight days before she died, Wickham-Jones reviewed a television film about Stonehenge, wondering why all the featured archaeologists were male. “We live in a diverse world,” she wrote. “Diversity existed in the past. Archaeology is a diverse profession. Surely we do not need to make much of an effort to reflect that in all we do?”
She was an honorary fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland and a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and at various times a trustee of the John Muir Trust and the Orkney Archaeological Trust, and a director of the Caithness Archaeological Trust.
She is survived by Guille and by her brothers, Tom and Mark.
• Caroline Wickham-Jones, archaeologist, born 25 April 1955; died 13 January 2022
She hosted online teaching from Orkney in a popular style that blossomed into public talks and tours