Professor Tony Wilkinson sadly passed away on 25 December 2014, at the far too early age of 66 years. Tony was one of the world's leading landscape archaeologists, and his fieldwork, research and publications have fundamentally changed our understanding of how the past landscape, particularly of the Near East, can be analysed and interpreted. His insights, guidance and unique personality will be missed by a huge range of colleagues and friends.
Born on 14 August 1948, Tony started on his academic career as a geographer, with degrees from Birkbeck College (1966–69) and McMaster University in Canada (1970–72). He rapidly shifted into a career in archaeology, initially in excavation in southern England, including a period with the Central Excavation Unit of English Heritage. However, his background in geography was something that Tony continued to draw on, both defining landscapes, and providing a methodological foundation from which new approaches could evolve.
Over his career, Tony redefined field survey in the Near East, and although his survey work ran over four decades, there are striking lines of continuity. Even during his first Near Eastern fieldwork in 1973 at Siraf in southern Iran, he was focussing on landscapes rather than simply sites, drawing attention to the extensive scatter of cultural material surrounding settlements as an indicator of possible ancient manuring, something which he later developed in several influential publications. In the early 1970s, this was not simply innovative in the Near East, it shows Tony as one of the global pioneers of landscape archaeology.
This approach was refined in the following years, in parallel with continued archaeology in Britain, through several seasons of work in Oman and a single season of survey around Tell Sweyhat (published, with two later seasons of survey, as Settlement and Land Use at Tell Sweyhat, and in the Upper Lake Tabqa, Syria in 2004). In the early 1980s, Tony seized the chance to develop his approaches in the landscape around Kurban Höyük, also developing his association with the Oriental Institute in Chicago; this was published, in 1990, as Town and Country in SE Anatolia, vol. 1. The second half of the 1980s saw Tony carry out four seasons of very arduous survey in northern Iraq (published, in 1995, as Settlement Development in the North Jazira, Iraq with David Tucker). During this time, he was often accompanied on fieldwork by his first wife, Judy.
When he became assistant director of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq in 1989, Tony ceased active field involvement in the UK. However, he continued to publish the results of this work throughout his career, leading, in 1995, to The Archaeology of the Essex Coast, Volume 1: The Hullbridge Survey and The Archaeology of the Essex Coast, Volume 2: Excavations at the Prehistoric Site of the Stumble, published in 2012. Tony brought his projects to a tidy conclusion. Although these aspects of Tony's archaeology might seem separate, there were striking parallels between his work in the two areas that Tony did so much to bring to the fore, including the recognition of sunken paths at the Stumble, essentially the same features as the hollow routeways radiating from ancient settlements in northern Mesopotamia.
After Iraq became inaccessible to archaeologists in 1990, new opportunities opened up for Tony at the Oriental Institute in Chicago, where, from 1992 to 2003, he was research associate and associate professor. He continued to undertake field surveys with amazing energy, notably at Titriş Höyük, the Amuq plain in south-east Turkey and the Balikh Valley in Syria, with briefer projects around Tell Brak, Tell Beydar and Tell Hamoukar, all in north-east Syria, and a series of seasons in Yemen (a survey project that Tony claimed had to change its name to one that he could remember more easily). Tony married Eleanor Barbanes in 1995 and she worked with him for much of his subsequent fieldwork, as a key collaborator and often co-author.
Tony always saw his fieldwork, not as a series of separate projects, but as complementary elements leading towards an understanding of wider patterns in the human use of landscapes and the methods that archaeologists could use to understand them. In Chicago, Tony gained larger-scale funding that enabled data to be more systematically integrated. The CAMEL (Center for Ancient Middle Eastern Landscapes) laboratory in the basement of the Oriental Institute was particularly influential in interpreting newly released satellite images (Tony was already a pioneer in the use of satellite images from the North Jazira Project, first with access through BP and later in Chicago). It also provided another context in which Tony enabled graduate students to flourish. The Modelling Ancient Settlement Systems project, with links to the Argonne National Laboratories, gained National Science Foundation funding in 2002, using a typically innovative approach to take ‘social modelling and use survey and textual sources to construct a complete cyber community of ancient Mesopotamia’. Although Tony left Chicago in 2003 to take up a position at Edinburgh, his role in this research continued and produced the edited volume Models of Mesopotamian Landscapes. How Small-scale Processes Contributed to the Growth of Early Civilizations (2013).
In 2003, Tony's important book Archaeological Landscapes of the Near East (University of Arizona Press, 2003) was also published. Although he claimed in its preface that ‘by covering such a broad canvas, there should be something in this book to annoy everyone’, it was both a very important statement of Tony's personal theoretical, methodological and interpretive approach to landscapes and a magisterial overview of the subject. It was no surprise that its influence was marked by the Society for American Archaeology Book Award in 2004 and the James R. Wiseman Book Award of the Archaeological institute of America in 2005. These were only two of a series of honours that recognized Tony's influence, including election as Fellow of the British Academy in 2008 and the award of the John Coles medal for Landscape Archaeology in 2009.
Tony was initially appointed as a lecturer in Edinburgh in 2003, but his impact was such that within 2 years, he had been promoted to professor. Although he left in 2006 to take up a professorship at Durham University, which he held until his death, two major collaborative projects emerged in this period: the Land of Carchemish survey to the south of Carchemish in collaboration with Eddie Peltenburg; and the Gorgan Wall survey in northern Iran with Eberhard Saur. The latter produced a major monograph in 2013 (Persia's imperial power in Late Antiquity: the Great Wall of Gorgan and the frontier landscapes of Sasanian Iran), the former is the subject of a forthcoming edited volume entitled Carchemish in Context: The Land of Carchemish Project, 2006–2010. In Durham, Tony continued to extend his efforts to integrate surveys in different parts of the Near East, gaining, along with Graham Philip, large-scale AHRC funding to support the Fragile Crescent Project between 2008 and 2012.
While a great academic in all facets, Tony's work always drew on innovative and exemplary field survey. During fieldwork, Tony had immense energy and stamina. Anyone who undertook field walking with him discovered just how much ground Tony could cover in 1 day. It was somewhat amusing to see that, after Tony became a fellow of the British Academy in 2008 and with that august status gained an entry in Who's Who, he listed one of his recreations as walking. It really was. Has anyone has ever covered so much ground in the cause of Near Eastern archaeology?
A particular thing that distinguished Tony over many years was his collaborative approach. Often his landscape projects spun around a major excavation, providing a logistical base, a defined research context and well-established local ceramic sequences. The list of major sites and major archaeologists who have Tony to thank for placing their excavations into a wider landscape context is itself impressive. Even more, Tony's survey projects were inclusive, not simply made up of a director and a team, but a group of individuals working together, all of whom had the opportunity to analyse, interpret and often publish individually and as co-authors. Many graduate students started working within Tony's projects and ultimately ran and published parts of them. One of Tony's great skills was to take postgraduate students and turn them into collaborators. It's no surprise, therefore, that there is a new generation of academics, who started working with Tony as students but are now taking forward his legacy. There is no danger that the approach to landscape developed by Tony will be a dead end – it is not only being continued by former collaborators, but developed in new directions, very much in the spirit of Tony himself. His is a lasting and dynamic legacy.
Although Tony was a well-established researcher well before he became involved in regular academic teaching, only starting to teach courses once he was in position at the Oriental Institute, it was no surprise that he proved to be an inspiring, attentive and caring teacher at Chicago, Edinburgh and Durham. A key element of his legacy will be the influence of his former PhD students, many of whom first encountered Tony as undergraduates.
To talk about Tony purely as an archaeologist and an academic would be to do him a disservice. Tony was more than that he was a wonderful person, great fun to spend time with and with a wide range of interests. Mostly strikingly from 1982 to 1990 his musical talents found an outlet playing harmonica in the Bamboo Beat Band, a fondly remembered Rhythm and Blues group based in the Lincoln area. Quite how, in the pre-internet era, Tony co-ordinated his Near Eastern fieldwork with fulfilling a programme of gigs was, I think, a mystery to Tony as much as anyone else. As well as harmonica, he also played guitar and mouth harp, often enlivening fieldwork, and sometimes followed by his distinctive style of dancing. Tony's friendship was valued by a great many people.
Tony felt the turbulent politics of the Middle East keenly, partly in its repeated impact on where fieldwork could be conducted, but particularly on the impact of communities in which he had worked. In May 2003, he was one of the first group of western archaeologists to tour Iraq to evaluate the damage done to archaeological sites by war and looting. In December 2008, together with Eleanor, he helped organize a memorable workshop in Durham, which brought to the UK many of the archaeologists from northern Iraq, with whom he had worked in the 1980s, for a meeting full of reunions and renewed friendships. More widely, moving around the Middle East in Tony's wake, I have been repeatedly struck by how fondly he was talked of in museums, by drivers he worked with on survey and other people who had encountered him.
Friends and colleagues, in the Middle East and around the world, will profoundly miss Tony's wisdom, calm, supportive friendship, unfailing and perceptive humour, and incredible energy and scholarship and will all wish to extend their sympathy to Tony's wife Eleanor Barbanes Wilkinson and their families.