Page 67 - John Barber's Oakham Castle and its archaeology

Peter Gathercole
(1929-2010)

Peter Gathercole was born on 27th March 1929 in Tilney St
Lawrence, in the Norfolk fens, into a family of grocers. He
attended St Paul’s Cathedral Choir School, London and Clifton
College, Bristol. St Paul’s was evacuated during the War to the
Cathedral School in Truro, and this move began his life-long
association with Cornwall.
Peter did his army national service between 1947-49, serving
in Egypt where he was eventually promoted to the rank of
Warrant Officer in the Army Education Corps. His subsequent
education was at Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he studied
History and Archaeology (1949-52), and the Institute of
Archaeology, University of London (1952-54) where he gained
his Postgraduate Diploma in European Prehistoric Archaeology
under the direction of Vere Gordon Childe. It was whilst at the
Institute that he carried out his archaeological investigation at
Oakham Castle (1953-54).
He then trained under Adrian Oswald as a curator in the
Department of Archaeology, Ethnology and Local History, at
Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery (1954-56), at the same time
undertaking various rescue excavations. Then he spent two years at Scunthorpe Museum before moving to
New Zealand to teach at the University of Otago (1958-68), also working at the Otago Museum. There he
is well remembered for helping to establish a fully functioning Department of Anthropology and
Archaeology run jointly by the Museum and the University. The teaching and practice of modern
archaeology in New Zealand owes much to Peter’s expertise and enthusiasm, recognised by his
appointment to an honorary fellowship.
Peter returned to England to work as Lecturer in Ethnology at Oxford, jointly with the Pitt Rivers
Museum, until he became the Principal Curator of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in
Cambridge (1970-81), subsequently taking up the position of Dean at Darwin College from which he
retired as an Emeritus Fellow in 1994. He became the first chairman of the UK Museum Ethnographers
Group in 1975, and maintained a continuing research interest in the Pacific region, drawing particularly on
European collections.
Peter retired to Cornwall, where he served a term as President of the Cornwall Archaeological Society
and contributed significantly to that Society’s activities. He made his home at Veryan, and died on 11th
October 2010.

For a perceptive and more detailed obituary, see
http://www.worldarchaeologicalcongress.org/component/content/article/1-latest/520-peter-gathercole-1929-2010-a-
life-well-lived

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