Hugh Sackett died early on 12 April, Easter Day, 2020. Known as Hugh, but christened Leyland Hugh with a family name in front (which often led to his being called L. Hugh Sackett in the USA), he was a leader of the British School at Athens and British archaeology in Greece for over 60 years, while teaching throughout that time at Groton School in Massachusetts. A big person but modest, kind and quietly adventurous, and a brilliant teacher who did not shout, Hugh was an early exemplar of both the diachronic approach to understanding Greece and the collaborative management of field projects – with magnificent results. His excavations and surveys, always as a, or the, co-director and ranging from prehistoric and Early Iron Age Euboea, principally at Lefkandi, via Classical Attica, to Minoan Palaikastro and Roman Knossos in Crete, have done much for our understanding of previously less publicised places and periods of civilisation in Greece – and made for exciting teaching at Groton. He was also willing, long after he had become a boss, to be a trench supervisor or other assistant on others’ projects, including Myrtos–Fournou Koryfi and Pyrgos, Mycenae, Sparta–Menelaion and Agrileza. Reward came in 2014 when he received the Gold Medal of the Archaeological Institute of America, the USA's highest award for Old World archaeology. He is the only schoolteacher to be so honoured and at the time was not an American citizen, just a resident alien with a Green Card.

Hugh was born to Dorothy and Barrett Sackett on 13 August 1928 at 57 Banbury Road in north Oxford, the house of Dorothy's Methodist parents George and Alice Salter, whose family firm based beside the Thames at Folly Bridge in Oxford has been building boats since 1848 and running trips on the river with Salters Steamers. Barrett, a Methodist too, was a schoolmaster, about to move from being a housemaster at Christ's Hospital at Horsham to headmaster at the age of 32 of Kingswood School at Bath (the Methodist school founded by John Wesley): he held the post until 1959. He had been a boy at Kingswood, winning an Exhibition to Merton College, Oxford in 1914. Hugh did the same, reaching Merton in 1949 after National Service. His three brothers were also at Merton, two overlapping with him, as did a cousin; and two uncles, who had married Dorothy Salter's sisters, had been at Merton too.

Early life was settled and idyllic: in the holidays the young Sacketts had all the space of Kingswood to run in. But when war came, Bath was a target, with its naval establishment and being close to the docks at Bristol. When the Admiralty requisitioned the school, it moved to Uppingham in Rutland, whose headmaster John Wolfenden (later Director of the British Museum, if best known for the Wolfenden Report of 1957 recommending that homosexual behaviour no longer be a criminal offence) offered space to other schools.

Hugh was good at work and games; and the family took bicycle trips to churches, his brother Robert recalls, with brass rubbing, watercolours, botanising, and swims in local streams. Hugh painted churches and landscapes, and in Rutland drew pond life collected in jam jars with his father – the start, surely, of his immaculate archaeological plans and sections, complemented by small, neat ‘slightly back-sloping’ handwriting, Robert points out, that never changed throughout his life. Best of all were the holidays in Oxford on one of their grandfather's boats. There was no petrol, so they had to pull a heavy eight-berth cruiser with a camping punt hooked behind by rope along the Thames's overgrown towpaths. From time to time a passing Salter steamer delivered milk and bread. The river was clean to swim in; and sleeping in the punt one heard the plop of the water rats. Dorchester Abbey and nearby Wittenham Clumps 15 miles downstream were the destination. But pulling the boats back against the flow was hard.

After National Service in the Royal Artillery, which meant reading books lying in the heather on the west coast of Scotland (and writing letters for a commanding officer who found them difficult), Hugh read Greats (Literae Humaniores) at Merton, with financial support from the Army as well as the College's Exhibition, and was in the rugby XV. His tutors included Robert Levens for Greek and Latin language and literature, and Robin Harrison for Greek history. In 1952 he came to the British School in the summer vacation to explore Greece with what were then called Student Privileges. They were popular with undergraduates: one could stay at the School and use the Library.

After finals, he stayed on a year to do a Dip. Ed. He had really wanted to do an advanced degree in Greek archaeology, but that was too much for the Army. All the same, he then applied for, and won, a Rotary Foundation Fellowship for a year as a regular Student of the School. He arrived in Athens in October 1954, when John Boardman was starting his last year as Assistant Director and Sinclair Hood his first as Director; both were running the School's excavations at Emporio in Chios. The Visiting Fellow, only the third in the position, was A.W. Gomme. (For an account by Hugh of the School between 1945 and 1990, and its work in Crete, see Sackett Reference Sackett and Huxley2000.)

Hugh travelled widely in Greece and, doubtless, often uncomfortably, as was normal for the Students, especially when they were away from Athens looking for a lead on what to research. He also went to Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Turkey where, as in Greece, he met local Rotarians and learnt first-hand about their countries as well as their antiquities. Back in Greece, he took part in the excavations in Chios. In the era when doctoral deadlines were looser, and regardless of their specialities in Hellenic studies, the Students were expected to abandon the Library and join a team effort in the trenches and potshed of ‘the School excavation’, and perhaps learn the fragility of archaeological evidence. Almost all did. This was the School's principal project with the Director and/or Assistant Director in charge, or their recent predecessors. With less of a penchant then for acronyms, it was always called the School excavation; ‘BSA’ was used as an alternative way to refer to the School's Annual. Phylakopi in 1896–9 must be the first School excavation of this type, followed before World War I by Zakros and Palaikastro, and then Sparta. Of late, excavations under the aegis of the School have been to the fore, while School excavations of the old type have fallen into abeyance. The last were at Knossos under Hugh and Mervyn Popham, and Peter Warren, and at Sparta under Hector Catling, all a generation ago or more.

1954–5 at the British School at Athens saw too the first of Hugh's many cooperative field projects. All his life Hugh stood out as a natural colleague and welcome co-principal, starting with John Ellis Jones, a fellow Student who became a lifelong friend. Their first project was a survey of the Dema (Το Δέμα) Wall defence work in north-west Attica. It closes the gap of lower ground between the Aigaleos and Parnes mountain ranges and was intended to prevent attacks from the west. A series of sallyports allowed the Athenians to come out for counterattacks – but would also have been entry points for the enemy. Their comprehensive report, with a historical section by C.W.J. Eliot of the American School, came out promptly in the Annual of 1957. In an elegant combination of archaeological and written evidence (Jones, Sackett and Eliot Reference Jones, Sackett and Eliot1957), they date the Dema Wall to 337–336 bc, and suggest that it could be one of Lycurgus’ public works. Homer Thompson, director of the Athenian Agora excavations, ‘gave us full marks for completing a small but self-contained excavation’, Jones recalls.

If the Dema Wall was jumping into archaeology at the deep end in a seminal year for Hugh, that was also the case with teaching. Robert Levens at Merton suggested him for a post at Groton, and he was appointed. He sent a one page curriculum vitae, which he called his ‘swank sheet’. It had all that Groton could want: a Methodist, but ‘happy to attend Church of England services’ (a nice Anglican misnomer); head of house at school; Oxford and the Rotary Fellowship in Athens; rugger (‘glad to help’); teaching at Christ's Hospital for the Dip. Ed.; and ‘keen to help with housemastering’ (of which he had some experience at Christ's Hospital). Among his references are two gems from masters at Kingswood: ‘I cannot think of anyone more likely to develop into a first-class teacher’; ‘his modest but strong personality and his thoroughly dependable character with rare gifts of tact, fairness and a true sense of humour.’ A move from the ordered home-and-school life of Kingswood to the ordered school life of Groton could not have been a problem. Later, Hugh put his being accepted for the job very much down to his landlady in Oxford. Groton telephoned at a time when he was out; she told them at length what a nice chap he was. That made a crucial difference, Hugh believed.

A new pattern of life began to emerge that would last 63 years: autumn, winter and spring for teaching; the long summer vacation in Greece. Later, Groton often gave him extra time away to continue fieldwork, and a colleague Rogers Scudder came out of retirement to do his teaching. This institutional generosity was matched by the value of Hugh's research, and what it brought to the classroom, and too by his taking Groton boys (later, boys and girls) to work with him and come on study trips round Greece. But in 1956 he spent less time in Greece, and more in England, to cope better with the demands of abruptly changing continents. He was listed that year as one of the ‘Visitors residing at the School’, as was ‘Mr. M.R. Popham’. Did they meet?

In 1957 the new routine settled down. Hugh joined Sinclair Hood at Knossos for his programme of School excavations to test Arthur Evans' Minoan system (Hood Reference Hood1962; Hood and Cadogan Reference Hood and Cadogan2011, 1–4), continuing until 1961. In 1960 Hood placed me under him at the Royal Road: North site, next to Evans' Armoury (or Arsenal); another assistant for him for some of the season was Mercy Seiradaki, who had been John Pendlebury's principal colleague. It was hot and tiring work. We were in a large hole in the ground, the kouskouras of its sides reflecting the heat of the sun, for an eight-hour day on site that did not start until seven in the morning. At noon we went back to the Villa Ariadne for lunch and a short siesta, to return groggy to the oven of an excavation for the 2.00 to 5.00 session. Hugh coped better. He had found an irrigation tank up the Kairatos valley and cycled there for midday dips. In the sauna of Royal Road: North he was always cool and collected, and an excellent teacher of the British School's methods of digging as well as the modern Greek that a neophyte in Cretan archaeology needed to communicate with the workforce.

After the 1960 Knossos season, Hugh joined Jones and John Graham to excavate a country house that they had come on when surveying the Dema Wall. Since it lies in a vulnerable spot immediately outside the Wall to the west, it was important to try to confirm (or amend) the date of c. 420 bc that was proposed in the 1957 report on the Wall. In another elegant, prompt and comprehensive report (Jones, Sackett and Graham Reference Jones, Sackett and Graham1962), they argue convincingly for the construction of the house during the time of the Peace of Nicias of 421 bc that ended the first round of the Peloponnesian War and before the second round, and the Spartans’ capture of Decelea in 413 bc. To build a substantial house in open country on the line of attack of Athens’ enemies needed peace and confidence. It is important evidence for the Athenians’ optimism at the time.

1961 was the last year of Hood's excavations at Knossos, when a new assistant at Royal Road: North was Mervyn Popham. The principal discoveries, in both of which Hugh had the leading role, were a large Late Minoan (LM) IB pottery deposit (Hood Reference Hood, Brogan and Hallager2011) and a rare Early Minoan (EM) II–III sequence of occupation beneath the LM I levels (Hood and Cadogan Reference Hood and Cadogan2011). In the autumn that year Hugh forsook Groton (which kept the place open for him) to become Assistant Director of the School in succession to Philip Sherrard, while Popham was the senior Student (as Macmillan Student cum School Student in plurality: perhaps a money-saving ploy of the Managing Committee). The upshot was a School excavation at Palaikastro in the far east of Crete with the aim, like Hood's programme at Knossos, of checking its sequence of Minoan occupation through excavating at disparate parts of the site: 60 years after the British School at Athens had first worked there, it was still seen as a British concession. Complementing the new work of Nikolaos Platon at nearby Kato Zakros, it was a timely move to help resurrect the place of east Crete in Minoan culture. Two seasons in 1962 and 1963 produced plenty of information for nearly all periods of the Bronze Age (Sackett and Popham Reference Sackett and Popham1965; Reference Sackett and Popham1970).

Then life changed again for Hugh. He had been wondering whether to try his luck as a full-time archaeologist or stay at Groton. Groton won, and he returned to a secure life and skills that he had already mastered, with a double bonus: the generous amount of time in Greece and contacts with potential US donors among the school's parents, alumni and friends. Popham moved up to the Assistant Directorship, and Lefkandi in Euboea replaced Palaikastro as the School excavation. The first season was in 1964. The Groton connection had a leading part in the success of both Lefkandi and Palaikastro as, later, did Malcolm Wiener's Institute for Aegean Prehistory.

At Palaikastro, fieldwork did not resume until 1983, when Hugh, working with Sandy MacGillivray, then the School's Curator at Knossos, and Jan Driessen, who had just arrived at Knossos to study Minoan architecture, started a new multi-year, multi-disciplinary programme of excavations and study at this very large settlement (summaries: MacGillivray and Sackettt Reference MacGillivray, Sackett, Myers, Myers and Cadogan1992; Reference MacGillivray, Sackett and Cline2010) with a topographical and magnetic survey (MacGillivray, Sackett et al. Reference MacGillivray and Sackett1984). An essential part of this was setting up a study centre in Palaikastro village in a building with an old olive press provided by the monastery of Toplou.

Excavations as part of this new programme started in 1986 and stopped in 2003, but publications are still appearing (MacGillivray and Sackett Reference MacGillivray and Sackett2019 is the latest; earlier volumes are MacGillivray, Sackett and Driessen Reference MacGillivray, Sackett and Driessen2007 and Knappett and Cunningham Reference Knappett and Cunningham2012; others are in the pipeline). A fantastic find, broken into many tiny pieces and scattered as if it had been smashed against a wall, was the chryselephantine statuette known as the Palaikastro Kouros (MacGillivray, Driessen and Sackett Reference MacGillivray, Driessen and Sackett2000; Sackett Reference Sackett2006), which is now the centrepiece of the Siteia Archaeological Museum. This male, his fists clenched against his chest in an act of reverence, is about 50 cm high and made of ivory, gold, serpentinite, rock crystal and Egyptian blue. He was smashed and burnt in the LM IB destruction of the settlement but, thanks to a meticulous reconstruction that was a triumph of excavation, sieving and conservation, survives to extend our understanding of Minoan art and the role of males in the world of the Minoan elite. The topic has become popular in recent years.

The first pieces of the Kouros came to light in 1987, and more of him in 1988. The soil from excavating was kept and sieved: a big task that did not finish until 1989, but the results were worth the effort. 1988 also saw a blockade of the village by villagers in a planning permission dispute with the Archaeological Service in Siteia. The excavation could not escape being involved, and work stopped. The road to Siteia was shut – how then to get members of the team to the airport? Military music was played from the church's bell towers, and the bells rung at dawn and dusk. Hugh and MacGillivray began multilateral negotiations, with the blockade committee in the village over raki, the Ephor in Siteia, the Director of the School in Athens (with the British Embassy in the background), and the team's lawyer, who came over from Chania. Before mobiles, telephoning was difficult and coin-devouring. After a week, goodwill prevailed and work resumed. There were precedents at Palaikastro for such misunderstandings in the early 1900s, and again in 1962 and 1963, Hugh noted in a letter to donors redolent of accepting life's rich tapestry.Footnote ¹

Study for publication is now near the end. In the meantime, a team led by Carl Knappett with Alexandra Livarda and Nicoletta Momigliano started a new fieldwork programme at Palaikastro.

The excavation at Lefkandi–Xeropolis, a coastal tell between Chalcis and Eretria on the edge of the rich Lelantine Plain that was a casus belli between the two cities in the eighth century bc, started as a result of a collaborative and intermittent old-fashioned, non-intensive survey of prehistoric sites in Euboea that Vronwy Hankey had begun in 1939 and Hugh and others from the British and American Schools resuscitated in 1961–5, with many ekdromes from Athens. Their report (Sackett et al. Reference Sackett, Hankey, Howell, Jacobsen and Popham1966) is a first-rate account of the island from Neolithic to Protogeometric times, which has aged well and is still instructive. Following their diachronic approach to Palaikastro, two sites looked especially attractive to Popham and Hugh for excavations: Lefkandi–Xeropolis, and Amarynthos–Palaiokhoria at the east end of the plain of Eretria.

Xeropolis won the day. Trials in 1964 led to three seasons of regular excavations (one in 1965 and two in 1966), soon followed by a preliminary report (Popham and Sackett Reference Popham and Sackett1968). From mid-third millennium links with the Cyclades and Anatolia, via late Mycenaean pictorial style kraters – let alone intramural burials of children (Evely Reference Evely2006) and Protogeometric earth moulds for bronze tripods and pendent semicircle skyphoi – (some of) which could have been made at Lefkandi, where a brick works using clay from the Lelantine plain was next to Xeropolis – this settlement was an excellent choice. It fulfilled the promise the Sunday expeditions had noted, and it gave flesh to the then new suggestions of John Boardman on the key role of Euboea in Early Iron Age Greece. Excavation and study continue, directed by Irene Lemos.

In 1965 Hugh was still at Groton when the season began. In the trenches we looked forward to his arrival. Many have wondered how he and Popham made such an excellent team. They were different types. Popham was tense, critical (and self-critical) and demanding, with intellectual drive and a sharp sensitivity to style (hence his brilliance at analysing pottery as part of history), but probably less adept in sensing how others reacted to his tough handling of them. Hugh was calm, quiet and kind; he could lead teams and get jobs done by encouragement, helped by both a practical approach to life and a sense of the (often bureaucratic) absurd, which he would report with a grin and a chuckle from under his half-turned head. To one member of the Lefkandi team, who could not wait for his arrival each season, ‘a kind giant’ came to the rescue. How then did these co-directors manage to get on? Their age was about the same, Popham a year older, and they were both unmarried. Hugh liked swimming and snorkelling; I do not think Popham did at all (nor was he a skier; Hugh was at Groton). But with different experiences (Popham had been in the Colonial Service in Cyprus in the 1950s) they complemented each other in the skills of managing a dig and, somehow, must have enjoyed their differences.

Perhaps the deepest link was that they were both masters of the art of excavating, and decisive and forthright in the perennial test of drawing final sections: where does one put the line that separates one level from another? So often it marks the course of human occupation of the site, and hence its archaeological contribution to a mosaic of the history that can range from the site by itself to the district, region, archipelago, or even the whole eastern Mediterranean. They trusted each other to get it right. They were also both powerful teachers who, thanks to the system of School excavations, had the opportunity to teach a generation of Students of the School how to dig, and be able to explain at any moment what they were doing and why, and how to keep a human perspective in recording what they observed. And both were inductive thinkers who formed arguments from the evidence before them rather than deductively following wordy theories, with the omnipresent danger of knowing what you had found before you ever found it.

Hugh topped off Lefkandi 1966 with four weeks with Jones and Graham cleaning a country house on the east slopes of Mount Hymettus below the Cave of Pan at Vari. Their excitingly comprehensive report (Jones, Graham and Sackett Reference Jones, Graham and Sackett1973) exploring every aspect of the property is essential reading for students of the society and economy of Hellenistic Athens. The house dates to plus or minus 300 bc, or 100 to 150 years later than the Dema House the other side of Attica. It had an enclosure wall around it and was probably a farmhouse. But the evidence is scanty, except that the people made Hymettus honey: the report discusses beekeeping fully.

After three years at Xeropolis, Popham and Hugh took the School excavation back to Crete, to Knossos, where in 1967 and 1968 Hugh began on the post-Minoan strata that lay above the Minoan so-called Unexplored Mansion that is a short way downhill from the Stratigraphical Museum. The aim was to add to the less known history of the city and at the same time to work down to a surface at the top of the Bronze Age deposits, where the soil usually had a yellow tinge, and clear it of later intrusions (such as remains of buildings, pits, wells and robber trenches) where the soil was usually more grey. Hugh found an undulating interface between the Bronze Age and later occupation with plenty of bumps and holes from the incursions into the Bronze Age levels. It was a masterclass in how to excavate.

The report by Hugh and his team of the operations at Knossos in the levels above the Unexplored Mansion (Sackett Reference Sackett1992) is a valuable general account based on settlement evidence of a small but well-situated part of Knossos overlooking the ruins of the Bronze Age Palace of Minos, from Sub-Minoan and Protogeometric times until the late second or early third centuries ad. It is particularly impressive in showing how to extract a long history from scrappy remains, except in the Roman period – where Jones's architectural analysis was invaluable.

After Knossos 1967, Hugh went as a trench supervisor to Peter Warren's new excavation of the EM II settlement of Myrtos–Fournou Koryfi, returning to Myrtos in autumn 1970 to do the same for me at Pyrgos, the other major prehistoric site in the region. The first thing he found was the best deposit to survive from the EM IIB destruction of the settlement. His second trench was not so successful: a trial at the south-west corner of the top of the hill, facing the village of Myrtos. Two hours or so after work had begun, a woman came steaming up the hill, followed 100 m behind by her husband. She was angry. Picking up a handy pithos fragment, she threw it in the direction of Hugh. Uproar. Unknown to us, we were digging on her land. We apologised and stopped; and Hugh returned to Groton. In 1971–3, he came back to Knossos for his outstanding tasks at the Unexplored Mansion, resulting in the exemplary report (Sackett Reference Sackett1992).

In the meantime, Lefkandi had taken a new turn. By 1968 tombs and burials had been noticed on the slopes near Xeropolis, which led to rescue excavations in collaboration with, successively, Petros Themelis, Petros Calligas and Evi Touloupa of the Archaeological Service to recover the Early Iron Age cemeteries – and inhabitants – of Lefkandi (Popham and Sackett Reference Popham and Sackett1980). Excavations continued for many years, albeit with constant wearying hitches about permissions and land ownership: Hugh was always a calming presence. And, as with the Kouros at Palaikastro, surprises awaited. The Lefkandi Centaur was one of them. Found in parts in two different tombs, the gash in its left knee makes it the best candidate for the first specific representation of classical mythology dating to the early ninth century: the ‘wounded healer’ centaur Cheiron whom Herakles shot in the knee by mistake. Another surprise is another first: the oldest peristyle structure of the Aegean is the Toumba Building, also known as the Heroön, of Lefkandi, which is about a century older than the Centaur (Popham, Calligas and Sackett Reference Popham, Calligas and Sackett1993). Probably, or possibly, it was the house/hall of a warrior that became a mighty tomb with astonishingly rich furnishings, including a Cypriot krater holding the cremated remains of the man with a folded robe of fine linen above them (now on display in the new Archaeological Museum in Chalcis together with the finds from the Toumba Building burials).

Hugh soon realised what a long-term undertaking the excavation and study of this key site was for the history of now-not-so-dark early Greece and understanding the major role of Euboea. A practical person, he bought a flat in Eretria. Nearly all the finds of the project ended up in the museum there.

Study and writing up the results of Lefkandi and Palaikastro, and organising and helping members of the teams to do the same, occupied the archaeological part of Hugh's latter years. He wrote lively annual reports on Palaikastro, and nearly all of the catalogue of an exhibition in his honour at Groton (Sackett Reference Sackett2009), for which his Groton pupil and Palaikastro colleague Seán Hemingway had arranged loans from the Metropolitan Museum (where he is Curator in Charge in the Department of Greek and Roman Art). Seven years earlier Hugh, Driessen and MacGillivray had led the centenary celebrations (1902–2002) of British School at Athens research at Palaikastro, including an exhibition in the village school that later moved to London (handbook in English, French and Greek: Driessen, MacGillivray and Sackett Reference Driessen, MacGillivray and Sackett2003).

Groton was the other focus of his working life, from 1955 through till 2018, when he retired after 63 years – broken only by the two years as Assistant Director in Athens – of teaching and mentoring, and taking his pupils on study tours in Greece and for work as volunteers at, mainly, Palaikastro: the exhibition handbook of 2003 lists already 30 of them by 2002. If they travelled in his car, for a long time a battleship-grey tank of a Mercedes, the journey would be exciting thanks to Hugh's ability to power the vehicle around potholes and other hazards, and to inflict good behaviour on any errant drivers in the way. Yet there were no accidents. But former headmaster Bill Polk recalls: ‘At the end of one excursion with Hugh at the wheel, a student got out of the car and kissed the ground!’ For Polk, who had been in Hugh's first class at Groton in 1955, Hugh became a ‘valued colleague, wise counsellor and close friend … Being in the presence of genuine modesty is rare these days. That was just a part of who Hugh was’.

Moving memories on the Groton website confirm that he was one of those rare teachers who shape our lives for decades. Over in Greece I learnt much from him and Popham about digging and the precision work of drawing sections and how to run a dig and the multitude of matters, serious and trivial, that it involved. Years later, I was glad that Hugh agreed to be the first President of the British School at Athens Foundation, with the help of his stepson Henry Davis and his wife Belle Burden, lawyers at Davis, Polk & Wardwell in New York, in setting up the US tax-exempt 501(c)(3) corporation. We needed his experience.

Two achievements remain. On 4 January 1995 Hugh and Eleanor Davis (née Childs) were married by a Justice of the Peace in Antigua, with her two clerks as the witnesses. Eleanor is the mother of Townsend and Henry Davis, who had both been to Groton, and their sister Ruth Davis Konigsberg, who is a Groton parent. All three had worked in Greece with Hugh, as had Eleanor as an artist. It was a happy and blessed union; and Hugh was delighted to gain three stepchildren, to match the three children he knew in his heart he had had for years: Knossos, Lefkandi and Palaikastro (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1.

Hugh Sackett (centre) flanked by Jan Driessen (left) and Sandy MacGillivray (right) on top of Kastri with Palaikastro in the background (1998).

The other was receiving the Gold Medal for Distinguished Archaeological Achievement of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) in 2014. Back in 1973 Hugh had been elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and then a Vice-President of the British School at Athens in 2007–8, but the Gold Medal of the AIA dwarfed their recognition. The citation (Archaeological Institute of America 2014) records his lifelong dedication to teaching, followed by his ‘excellent and meticulous fieldwork’ on ‘more, and more significant, sites than most of us could ever dream of’, and his breadth of interest ‘for more than 60 years as a teacher, field archaeologist, and advocate for Greek heritage – and he has done it all with great humility, loyalty, and generosity of spirit’. Soon afterwards he took US citizenship, to the joy of his American family. But he never ceased to be an Englishman, whose upbringing brought out the best in him all his life, and who spent half of it in the midday sun of Greece, where he realised little could have happened without the skill and support of master pickman Nikos Daskalakis of Knossos. Hugh was loved in all three countries.