15 Facts About Sinclair Hood

Sinclair Hood was Director of the British School at Athens from 1954 to 1962, and led the excavations at Knossos from 1957 to 1961.

Sinclair Hood turned 100 in January 2017 and died in January 2021, two weeks short of his 104th birthday.

Sinclair Hood transferred to be under the command of Thomas Fairfax and settled in Yorkshire.

Sinclair Hood's father's sister, Grace Mary Crowfoot, was a pioneer of archaeological textiles, and married the educational administrator and archaeologist John Winter Crowfoot.

Sinclair Hood's father died shortly after the First World War ended in November 1918.

Sinclair Hood was raised by his mother in London in an Anglo-Catholic milieu, not far from Bude on the northern coast of Cornwall.

At his mother's behest, he apprenticed to a Chiswick architect for a time, which Sinclair Hood considered a "great help for [his] later career" in that he learned to measure and draw.

Sinclair Hood visited Greece before the Second World War, and after the war was a student at the British School at Athens, and the British Institute at Ankara.

Sinclair Hood was assistant director of the British School at Athens from 1949 to 1951, and served as its director from 1954 to 1962.

Sinclair Hood's work was done mostly in mainland Greece and in Turkey, but in Mandatory Palestine and on the island of Crete.

Sinclair Hood excavated at Emporio on Chios between 1952 and 1955, with several study sessions to 1961, and at Knossos between 1957 and 1961.

Sinclair Hood's instruction is tacit, by example; or explicit, and then informal, in the trench or the museum or over the dinner table.

Sinclair Hood considered his major life work to be the catalogue of the Bronze Age masons' marks at Knossos: The Masons' Marks of Minoan Knossos, edited by Lisa Bendall and published in 2020.

On 4 March 1957, Sinclair Hood married Girton College, Cambridge-educated classicist Rachel Simmons, whom he had met conducting the excavations at Emporio.

Sinclair Hood had previously been a secretary to writer J B Priestley, and would later organise Adult Literacy at Thame.