Harold Peake

Harold John Edward Peake, was a British archaeologist, anthropologist, museum curator, and independent scholar.

Career

Peake was honorary curator of the Newbury Museum, which became well known for its pottery and chronological displays. He served as the president of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland for a two-year period from 1926 to 1928. He was also a member of the council of the Society of Antiquaries of London from 1928 to 1930. He was known for his wide interests, from " research into the beginnings of cereal cultivation" in the Levant through to the local archaeology of Berkshire, and his unifying application of anthropological thought and archaeological evidence.
From 1927 through 1936, he was the co-author of the ten volumes of The Corridors of Time with H. J. Fleure, which aimed to cover world prehistory from "the dawn of human life to the periods when written ideas and abstract thought spread far and wide". A tenth volume was published posthumously in 1956 by Fleure who used research and notes they had done together.
He was awarded the Huxley Memorial Medal and Lecture in 1940; the lecture was titled "The study of prehistoric times".

Views

Peake proposed a "prospector theory" within the school of cultural diffusion: this theorised that the megalithic architecture of Europe such as the dolmens was spread by prospectors from the Eastern Mediterranean, probably originating from the Aegean Islands before 2200 BC, who were seeking commodities such as metal ores. He later argued that the rudiments of megalithic architecture originated in Syria c. 4000BC and from there spread to Egypt in the second pre-dynastic period and the eastern Mediterranean. He suggested that this was not the spread of a single culture within the same millennia, but of slow diffusion over time from mother sites to daughter sites, perhaps linked to a shared cult.
This is in contrast to Grafton Elliot Smith who argues for hyperdiffusionism with ancient Egypt as the single source of cultural practices, and to Luis Siret who argued that it was the Phoenicians who borough megaliths to the Iberian Peninsula. Peake suggested that Smith had overemphasised and oversimplified events by centring Egypt as the sole origin of cultural diffusion, and that Siret's argument was only possible because he moved the dates of the Phoenicians from 800 BC to 2000 BC.

The Cult of Kata

Along with a group of others, Harold Peake created a joke religion called The Cult of Kata. The group, calling itself the Kataric Circle, was active from 1908 until the mid-1920s and included Peake and his wife, the illustrator and writer Carli Peake, the archaeologists O. G. S. Crawford and Richard Lowe Thompson, the musicians Francis Toye and Geoffrey Toye, and the folk revivalist Mary Neal. Very skeptical towards established religion, the Cult advocated "wild worship", connecting archaeology with theatre, music, folk dance and song while promoting utopian artistic projects. It was formed around Peake's home, Westbrook House in Boxford. A wide range of celebrities and intellectuals were drawn to the group, including actress Ina Pelly, celebrity chef Marcel Boulestin, urban planner Patrick Geddes and sociologist Victor Branford. Carli Peake wrote a series of plays known as The Boxford Pastoral Masques, performed by the Katanic Circle annually from 1905 to 1913. Annual performances were revived in Boxford from 2000.

Selected works

The Corridors of Time