[3] In her second year at university she took part in the excavation of a Roman site near Colchester, and there met her future first husband, the archaeologist Christopher Hawkes (1905–1992).

[1] After her graduation, in 1932, she travelled to Palestine and joined the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem,[6] in order to excavate on Mount Carmel, alongside Yusra and Dorothy Garrod.

[7] In 1935 she led a BBC Radio programme "Ancient Britain Out of Doors", introducing key ideas about archaeology then discussing them with colleagues Stuart Piggott and Nowell Myres.

[11] In her memoir A Quest of Love, Hawkes described how, while in Dorset, her "violent emotional involvement with a woman" was "a sudden undamning of feelings of an intensity that I did not know I possessed".

[6] The vision of the pavilion created by Hawkes showed archaeological sites as if they were being discovered for the first time, proceeding chronologically from a prehistoric burial, to a Bronze Age gold necklace, to a Roman mosaic floor.

[18] Reviewed on its publication in The Journal of Geology as "literary expression ... rather than scientific description",[19] even Hawkes was aware that it was a difficult book to classify.

[12] Nevertheless, a review by Harold Nicolson helped to boost its popularity where he described "the weird beauty in this prophetic book ... it is written with a passion of love and hate".

Priestley's letters in the work were set in a "brash new America in Texas", whilst Hawkes' were written from the perspectives of indigenous societies in New Mexico.

[24] The subject of Hawkes' investigation was The Longstone; her research, which was published in Antiquity, demonstrated that it was the remains of the entrance to a Neolithic long barrow.

[26] Its institutional origins have been described as an "elite pressure group", established as a "gathering" between peers, such as Bertrand Russell, George Kennan, Denis Healey and other public figures, who all knew each other.

[30] Hawkes was active in campaigning for the decriminalisation of gay sex through the Homosexual Law Reform Society (HLRS), of which she was a founding member.

[32] The trust was founded in 1958 to support the charitable work of the HLRS and Hawkes was a trustee along with Anthony Edward Dyson, Kenneth Walker, Andrew Hallidie Smith and Ambrose Appelbe.

[36] Hawkes was responsible for writing the sections on the palaeolithic and neolithic, whereas Woolley's approach renounced the global and he wrote on the Bronze Age in the area that was then termed "the fertile crescent".

De Laet, Hawkes' writing style was praised as was her emphasis on a "global" prehistory; however some of the factual information she included was accused of being out of date.

[40] She used evidence from art to argue that the society was matriarchal: "the absence of these manifestations of the all-powerful male ruler that are so widespread at this time and in this stage of cultural development as to be almost universal, is one of the reasons for supposing that the occupants of Minoan thrones may have been queens".

[41] Reviewed by Frank Stubbings, he praised the book, describing how "the writer remembers always that these were real human beings"; however, he also had several caveats – some on questions of dating, but most of all on account of the poetic language used by Hawkes.

[42] Archaeologist Nicoletta Momigliano has placed Hawkes' Dawn of the Gods as part of a canon of 1960s "pacifist and hippie interpretations" that were influenced by Jungian psychology.

[8] The paper was widely debated, with archaeologist D. P. Agrawal suggesting in 1970 that her article was the "protests of a passing generation" and that it contributed to polemicisation of the field.

[5] In 1980 she published A Quest of Love, a creative memoir of her romantic and sexual life, where she imagined herself as different women across time, from a Palaeolithic shaman called Jakka to a Victorian governess.

[8][46][47] It was described by the New York Times critic Katha Pollitt as "antifeminist", a "humourless rambling document" and a "masochistic fantasia of the unconscious".

[48] However, in a 2018 reappraisal of the work, literary theorist Ina Habermann described it as a "visionary autobiography" and an "overlooked exercise in écriture feminine".

[8][51] Noted for her striking looks, she was the subject of the work of several photographers during her lifetime, including Lord Snowdon, Bern Schwartz, Mark Gerson, J. S. Lewinski and Tara Heinemann.

[3] Cremated, her ashes are interred with Priestley's at an unknown location in the churchyard of the Church of St Michael and All Angels, Hubberholme in North Yorkshire.