1. Gordon Hillman was a British archaeobotanist and academic at the UCL Institute of Archaeology.
19 Facts About Gordon Hillman
1. 2.
Gordon Hillman was interested in plants from an early age; his father owned Knights, a local plant nursery.
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Gordon Hillman's research was underpinned by long periods of botanical and archaeological fieldwork.
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The intended doctoral dissertation with Maria Hopf was never completed, and Gordon Hillman never acquired a doctoral degree.
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Gordon Hillman's reputation had spread worldwide by the 1980s, reflected in the geographical diversity of plant remains and students coming to the Institute.
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Many of Gordon 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 Pena-Chocarro and Lydia Zapata in Spain and Morocco.
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Gordon Hillman 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.
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Difficulty in identifying the fragmented plant remains characteristic of early sites led Gordon Hillman to build an excellent seed reference collection.
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Gordon Hillman originally proposed that wild food plants such as wild einkorn were foraged, in other words, collected from the wild.
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Gordon Hillman had a strong interest in hunter-gatherer diet independent of agricultural origins.
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Gordon Hillman often cited ethnographic studies of hunter-gatherers, often from North America, but from obscure European sources too.
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Gordon Hillman worked on material from many agricultural sites, including Can Hasan III and the Asvan project in Turkey, the PPNB layers of Abu Hureyra in Syria, Mycenae in Greece, and numerous sites in Wales.
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Analysis by Gordon Hillman's student Tim Holden found that his last meal was a coarse wheat and barley griddle bread.
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Gordon Hillman collaborated with food scientists Tony Leeds and Peter Ellis at King's College London, leading to nutritional analyses of acorns and sea club-rush tubers.
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Gordon Hillman had a major influence on the research infrastructure of archaeobotany, creating large reference collections at the British Institute at Ankara and the Institute of Archaeology, and his reputation raised the profile and credibility of archaeobotany during the critical period of its growth in the 1980s.
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In 2004 Gordon Hillman was awarded the Distinguished Economic Botanist award by the Society for Economic Botany.
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Gordon Hillman became well known on UK television via his work with Ray Mears on the BBC programme Wild Food broadcast in 2007.
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Gordon Hillman was briefly married to Wendy MacInnes, and is survived by their daughter and three grandsons.
19.
Gordon Hillman suffered from Parkinson's disease and died on 1 July 2018.