Sinclair Hood

Martin Sinclair Frankland Hood, (31 January 1917 – 18 January 2021), generally known as Sinclair Hood, was a British archaeologist and academic. He was Director of the British School at Athens from 1954 to 1962, and led the excavations at Knossos from 1957 to 1961. He turned 100 in January 2017 and died in January 2021, two weeks short of his 104th birthday.

As its review in the American Journal of Archaeology forecast, his The Arts in Prehistoric Greece became a "standard authoritative handbook for years to come" on Aegean art.

Early life and education

Martin Sinclair Frankland Hood was born in Cobh, (then Queenstown, and a British naval base), Ireland, in 1917. Sinclair Hood's father died shortly after the First World War ended in November 1918. Sinclair was raised by his mother in London in an Anglo-Catholic milieu, not far from Bude on the northern coast of Cornwall. Hood studied Classics and Modern History and received a Master of Arts degree from Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1938. He learned the rigorous method of excavation and the stratigraphical approach pioneered by Mortimer Wheeler and Kathleen Kenyon, working with her in London (Southwark) and also as the last assistant of Leonard Woolley at Atchana (then in Turkey). Hood visited Greece (but not Crete) before the Second World War, and after the war was a student at the British School at Athens, and the British Institute at Ankara. He took no academic or museum positions. Early in his career he did not take a post as assistant professor at Birmingham. Later, by his own account, he "was asked to put in for the job to run the Ashmolean, but ... decided not to go for it".

From the 1960s, Hood continued to excavate in Greece, and to write books. His contributions to academic research include The Bronze Age Palace at Knossos: Plan and Sections and the Archaeological Survey of the Knossos Area both published in 1981. He considered his major life work to be the catalogue of the Bronze Age masons' marks at Knossos: The Masons' Marks of Minoan Knossos, edited by Lisa Bendall and published in 2020.

He gave the following advice to aspiring archaeologists:

Personal life On 4 March 1957, Hood married Girton College, Cambridge-educated (MA 1949) classicist Rachel Simmons (1931–2016), whom he had met conducting the excavations at Emporio. She had previously been a secretary to writer J. B. Priestley, and would later organise Adult Literacy at Thame. They had a son, Martin, and two daughters, Mary and Dictynna.

Select bibliography For a fuller Bibliography of the Works of Sinclair Hood as published to 1994 and forthcoming from 1994, see Knossos: A Labyrinth of History, 1994, pages xix to xxv. The Minoans – Ancient Peoples and Places (Thames & Hudson Ltd 1971) The Arts in Prehistoric Greece (Pelican History of Art 1978, 2nd edn. 1992) (with David Smyth) Archaeological Survey of the Knossos Area (2nd edition revised and expanded; BSA Supplementary Volume 14; London 1981) The Masons' Marks of Minoan Knossos edited by Lisa Bendall (BSA Supplementary Volume 49, London 2020)