Gordon Hillman

Gordon Hillman (20 July 1943 – 1 July 2018) was a British archaeobotanist and academic at the UCL Institute of Archaeology.

He has been described as "a pivotal figure in the development of archaeobotany at the Institute of Archaeology at University College London, [who] through his research, publications and teaching had a major influence on the field worldwide."

Hillman was born in Hailsham, East Sussex to Joyce (née Connett) and Albert Hillman on 20 July 1943.

He was interested in plants from an early age; his father owned Knights, a local plant nursery.

After leaving school, he worked as a field studies assistant at Alston Moor, Cumbria, and then at the Natural History Museum in London from 1960 to 1965.

After studying agricultural botany at Reading University, in 1969 he went to Mainz in Germany to study archaeobotany with Maria Hopf.

Hillman's research was underpinned by long periods of botanical and archaeological fieldwork.

His first excavation (1969–70) was the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B site of Can Hasan III on the Konya Plain of central Turkey, where large-scale flotation recovered early domesticated plants, including rye.

Hillman's first post after study in Germany was as research fellow at the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara (now the British Institute at Ankara), where a short-term stint of fieldwork turned into a stay from 1969 to 1975.

The intended doctoral dissertation with Maria Hopf was never completed, and Hillman never acquired a doctoral degree.

From 1970-73 Hillman joined the excavations at the Aşvan Project, on the Murat river in eastern Turkey.

This was a pioneering multi-disciplinary excavation of four sites around the village of Aşvan, led by David French and involving a wide range of specialists, including those from anthropology, geography, zoology and botany.

Here Hillman implemented a large-scale flotation system for the second time, and carried out the ethnoarchaeological work on crop-processing that has been so influential in Old World archaeobotany.

In the early 1970s Hillman recognised that traditional crop-processing in the mostly unmechanised village of Asvan led to distinctive, consistent assemblages of crop seeds, chaff and weed seeds that could also be recognised in archaeobotanical samples.

Contemporary analysis of archaeobotanical samples by Robin Dennell and others had recognised this variation, with the implication that ancient seed assemblages could not be treated uncritically as representative of crop use, but had not identified the close association with crop processing stages.

Further fieldwork by Glynis Jones in Greece put Hillman's results onto a firmly quantified basis, and this mode of interpretation of plant remains - in terms of crop processing stages such as winnowing and sieving - is now a standard component of archaeobotany, particularly in the Old World.

Many of Hillman's students carried out ethnoarchaeological work, for example Sarah Mason and Mark Nesbitt in Turkey, Catherine D'Andrea and Ann Butler in Ethiopia, and Leonor Peña-Chocarro and Lydia Zapata in Spain and Morocco.

Other scholars acknowledge his influence, for example in work on wild foods in Turkey by Füsun Ertuğ, and on crop-processing in India by S.N. Reddy.

Hillman stressed the importance of first-hand knowledge of the ecology of wild food plants: "...perhaps... for too many years, we in archaeology have imagined that we could somehow research events of considerable ecological complexity - such as those surrounding the inception of cultivation - without ever needing to come to grips with the ecological detail".

In 1972-3 Hillman joined the excavations at Abu Hureyra directed by Andrew M. T. Moore.

Again, large-scale flotation was applied, resulting in the retrieval of over 500 litres of plant remains; the study of these formed the main subject of Hillman's research for much of the next 25 years.

Seeds and herbarium specimens collected in the vicinity of these excavations in Syria and Turkey formed the basis of Hillman's large seed reference collection, today divided between the British Institute at Ankara and the UCL Institute of Archaeology.

From 1975 to 1981 he was a part-time lecturer at the University of Wales, Cardiff (now Cardiff University) and part-time archaeobotanist for the Welsh archaeological trusts.

Hillman's reputation had spread worldwide by the 1980s, reflected in the geographical diversity of plant remains and students coming to the Institute.

Students were also attracted by his enthusiasm and kindness.

Something of the atmosphere of that period is conveyed in the introduction to Hillman's Festschrift volume: "Anyone exiting the third floor lift in the Institute of Archaeology in the 1980s and 1990s would have been confronted with the sight of Gordon's office, at times shared with up to three other colleagues and crammed full of books, cereal sheaves and reaping hooks, with at least 1-3 students and visiting colleagues, taking full advantage of his good nature, deep knowledge and awful coffee."

Hillman's contributions to understanding of ancient diet and food procurement were in five areas:

They were most influential with regard to wheat identification, playing an important part in the development in the 1980s of reliable criteria for identification of wheat chaff, particularly separation of tetraploid and hexaploid free-threshing wheat rachises.

Working with his students, Hillman explored a wide range of identification techniques including tuber and wood anatomy, infra-red spectroscopy and other forms of chemical analysis.

In 1981 he was head-hunted to the Institute of Archaeology, University of London (now part of University College London), by David Harris, the Institute's Professor of Human Environment.

Subsequent field trips followed, with a focus on the ecology of wild cereals, to eastern Turkey and Syria in 1983 with Professor David R. Harris, and to eastern Turkey in 1992 with Harris and Professor Daniel Zohary.

Hillman and Harris formed an effective team, most notably in fieldwork in Syria and Turkmenistan, and in organising the conference session at the Southampton World Archaeological Congress of 1986 that led to the publication of Foraging and farming: the evolution of plant exploitation in 1989.

Hillman's final fieldwork was to initiate archaeobotany at the Neolithic site of Jeitun, Turkmenistan, in 1989, 1990 and 1992.

The results of his botanical fieldwork were most fully explored for the site of Abu Hureyra, for which his 1996 paper and 2000 book make extensive use of current day plant distribution to model the availability of wild cereals and other foodstuffs in the Epipalaeolithic period.

Hillman also carried out experimental harvesting of wild cereals, leading to highly influential work with the geneticist Stuart Davies on modelling the potential speed of wheat domestication.

They concluded that selective pressures meant that morphological domestication in the form of loss rachis fragility could occur within 200 generations, thus 200 years for this annual crop.

Current interpretations of archaeological data by Dorian Fuller and others point instead to a prolonged process of domestication; nonetheless the debate is framed by the evolutionary theory and field data set out by Hillman and Davies.

Difficulty in identifying the fragmented plant remains characteristic of early sites led Hillman to build an excellent seed reference collection.

His identification guides often circulated in handwritten and drawn form.

At the Institute of Archaeology he held the post of Lecturer in Archaeobotany, then Reader, then Visiting Professor having retired early in 1997 on grounds of ill health.