Sonia Chadwick Hawkes

Chadwick Hawkes was born in Dartford in 1933. She excavated at Lullingstone villa as a school girl, and at Morgan Porth from 1951-53.[1] She studied English at Bedford College, University of London, before undertaking research at Birkbeck College, supervised by Vera I. Evison.[1] In 1959, she married Christopher Hawkes, Professor of European Archaeology at the University of Oxford,[2] after they met at an Iron Age conference in 1958.[3]

In 1958, she was appointed as Curator of Scunthorpe Museum. Hawkes was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries (FSA) in 1961. Hawkes was a research assistant at the Institute of Archaeology from 1959 to 1973.[2] From 1963 to 1971, Hawkes worked to catalogue a collection of finds from the antiquarian Bryan Faussett.[1] In 1973 she was appointed as a university lecturer at the University of Oxford, based at the Institute of Archaeology.

Hawkes' research focus was on Anglo Saxon cemeteries in Kent.[1]  A major piece of work on Late Roman zoormorphic belt fitting prompted much debate.[4] Hawkes excavated an Iron Age site at Longbridge Deverill.[5] In 1979 she co-founded the publication series Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History, and organised a series of interdisciplinary seminars and conferences in Anglo Saxon studies.[1] Sonia co-edited Greeks, Celts and Romans with her husband, Christopher Hawkes.

Hawkes retired in 1994.[2] An edited volume was published in her honour in 2007, edited by Martin Henig and Tyler Jo Smith.[6] A number of her works were bought to publication post-posthumously, including the Novum Inventorium Sepulchrale, an inventory of Kentish and Anglo Saxon grave goods.[7] Paul Nash created the lithograph 'Landscape of the Megaliths' in memory of Christopher and Sonia Hawkes.[3]