As part of this site's continuing homage to Andrew, here is a very detailed obituary in the Times (London).

Obituaries

The Times March 09, 2006

Andrew Sherratt
May 8, 1946 - February 24, 2006

Scholar whose thought-provoking discussion brought new ideas to prehistoric archaeology


ANDREW SHERRATT, the renowned archaeologist, had recently joined the department of archaeology at the University of Sheffield to take up a newly created Chair in Old World Prehistory, and the department was looking forward to a long and productive association with him. His death is a great loss to the department and on a personal basis, to his many friends and colleagues there.

The loss to British archaeology is incalculable but given the breadth of Sherratt’s learning and interest, it will be felt in the fields of European, Near Eastern and Asian archaeology as well. Sherratt’s work is of global significance, and the respect and reputation he enjoyed in Europe and North America was probably greater than at home. It is no exaggeration to say that he was one of the most original, creative and thought-provoking researchers in prehistoric archaeology.

Sherratt was born in May 1946 in Oldham, Lancashire. In 1965 he went to Cambridge University, having been awarded an open scholarship in history and then a senior scholarship in archaeology at Peterhouse, Cambridge. In the 1960s and 1970s creative research tension in archaeology was provided by the presence of Grahame Clark, Disney Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge and Master of Peterhouse, and David Clarke, a brilliant younger scholar. Sherratt profited from this association, completing a BA in archaeology and anthropology in 1968 and receiving a PhD from Cambridge in 1976 with his thesis The Beginning of the Bronze Age in Southeast Europe.

By then Sherratt had already moved to Oxford, where he was appointed assistant keeper of antiquities at the Ashmolean Museum in 1973. Oxford remained his academic home until last year. It was somewhat surprising that his expanding international reputation received recognition there only recently, when he was made a reader in 1997 and professor in 2002.

Sherratt travelled frequently as a visiting scholar, lecturing in Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Turkey, Russia and America. He was invited to deliver such lectures in archaeology as the Munro Lectures at Edinburgh in 1985, the David Clarke Memorial Lecture at Cambridge in 1995 and, perhaps most notably, the Context and Human Society Lectures at Boston University in 1998. His international reputation received further recognition by the award of the McNeill Erasmus Prize for 1998-99.

Sherratt’s intellectual contribution to archaeology is exceptionally wide ranging, varied, and always of outstanding quality. His ability to work at a global scale of analysis invited comparisons with another towering figure in archaeology, V. Gordon Childe. Like Childe, Sherratt had a commitment to a particular view of history in terms of geographical scope and scale of historical processes. They both had an amazing knowledge and capacity to address the important questions of the past, such as social and economic change in European prehistory, the origin of Indo-European languages, world systems theory and core and periphery relations; but also feasting and conspicuous consumption.

Of his publications, always insightful and incisive, perhaps the most cited is Plough and pastoralism: aspects of the secondary products revolution, published in 1981 in Pattern of the Past: studies in honour of David Clarke. It is no exaggeration to say that Sherratt’s ideas, expounded in this paper, revolutionised our understanding of early farming and are still valid today.

Sherratt was one of the few people, if not the only scholar, who could, with equal erudition and originality, write The genesis of megaliths (World Archaeology 22, 1990) and Instruments of conversion (Oxford Journal of Archaeology 14, 1995) on the one hand, and about Sacred and profane substances: the ritual use of narcotics in later Neolithic (Sacred and Profane, 1991) and Alcohol and its alternatives: symbol and substance in old world cultures (Consuming Habits: Drugs in history and anthropology, 1995) on the other.

The collection of his most significant publications in many of these areas appeared in 1996 as Economy and Society in Prehistoric Europe: changing perspectives.

Many remember Sherratt as a tutor at Cambridge in the early 1970s and as a teacher and colleague during his tenure at Oxford from mid-1970s onwards. At Cambridge his tutorials to undergraduate students became notorious because of their originality and generosity. Legend has it that students would come to Sherratt to wake him up, the tutorial beginning over morning coffee, and continuing all day over lunch, drinks and supper in various Cambridge pubs.

From early on Sherratt understood that teaching is not a matter of self-glorification, but one of sharing information and a common inquiry into the subject, and he somehow managed to maintain this perspective throughout his career.

He had just begun a new course about key issues in European prehistory and thanks to his skills of communication and capacity for engagement, the first three sessions turned out to be an exceptionally informative and refreshing experience. His enthusiasm remained unabated and many a colleague was surprised to find a brief inquiry had developed into a stimulating and wide- ranging discussion.

Sherratt will be remembered by many not only as an inspirational teacher, but also as an innovator who took a significant part in designing Oxford’s undergraduate course in archaeology and anthropology. Presenting his ideas at an appropriate level was a constant challenge, as is reflected in an early edited work, The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Archaeology (published in 1980 and translated into many languages).

Being open to new ideas and unafraid of utilising IT, Sherratt initiated the project ArchAtlas that uses remote sensing technology, combined with image and text, to communicate the complex patterns of change and interaction he studied so effectively. This was one of a number of projects Sherratt brought to Sheffield, and to which he hoped to devote his attention over the next few years. These projects will take their place alongside his many other successes and offer a fitting monument to one of the truly great thinkers in archaeology at the beginning of the 21st century.

Sherratt is survived by his wife and companion of more than 30 years, Sue, herself a distinguished archaeologist of the Aegean and the Near East. They published several studies together and Sherratt, with characteristic modesty, was fond of saying that she was the real scholar, while he was just a passenger in their journeys into the past. He is also survived by their three children.



Andrew Sherratt, archaeologist, was born on May 8, 1946. He died on February 24, 2006, aged 59.