Hugh O’Neill Hencken

Hugh O'Neill Hencken (January 8, 1902 – August 31, 1981) was an American archaeologist who specialized in Iron Age Europe. He was curator of European archaeology at the Peabody Museum, Harvard University, from 1932 to 1972.

Career O'Neill Hencken was born in New York City on January 8, 1902, to an Irish American family. He studied at Princeton University and the University of Cambridge, where he obtained a B.A. (1926), an M.A. (1929), and his PhD in archaeology in 1930. He was appointed the curator of European archaeology at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in 1932, serving until his retirement in 1972. In the 1940s he was part of the American Defense Harvard Group, a committee of Harvard faculty that compiled lists of historic monuments for the Allied forces in World War II.

Specializing in Iron Age Europe, O'Neill Hencken worked in a number of countries, including England, Ireland, Morocco, Algeria, Italy, and Greece. In the later years of his career he published a number of major synthetic studies, including The Earliest European Helmets (1971), and two volumes dealing with Etruscan origins, Tarquinia, Villanovans and Early Etruscans (1968) and Tarquinia and Etruscan Origins (1968).

O'Neill Hencken was an honorary member of the Prehistoric Society A Festschrift in his honour, Ancient Europe and the Mediterranean, edited by Vladimir Markotic, was published in 1977. His collected papers are held by the Harvard Library.

Personal life Hugh O'Neill Hencken married Mary Davies Hopkins at the Episcopal Church in Sedgefield, North Carolina on June 8, 1929. The marriage ended in divorce. His second wife Thalassa Cruso was a well-known television presenter. They met in Ireland, where both O'Neill Hencken and Cruso, a student of Mortimer Wheeler, were excavating, and married in London on October 12, 1935. They had three daughters. Thalassa died in Wellesley, MA on June 11, 1997. She was buried at Newton Cemetery, MA.