Helen Hughes-Brock


Helen Hughes-Brock is an independent scholar working in the archaeology of the Minoan civilization of Crete and Mycenaean Greece.

Personal life

She was born in Montreal in 1938 to Everett Cherrington Hughes and Helen MacGill Hughes. She was educated at Regina Coeli, the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, Cambridgeshire High School for Girls and Somerville College, University of Oxford. She was elected Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1990. She lives in Oxford with her husband, Sebastian Brock.

Scholarship

Hughes-Brock is a respected scholar of beads and seals in particular. Her principal interests are beads, seals and the finds of amber on Minoan and Mycenaean sites. She participated in British excavations at Palaikastro and the Mycenae Cult Centre and with the University of Minnesota at Nichoria and has contributed to reports on other excavations. She has served on the Bead Study Trust and the International Committee for the Study of Amber in Archaeology. She has also occasionally participated in the work of her husband, Sebastian Brock, on Syriac studies. In the 1960s and 1970s on their journeys in the Syriac heartlands of S.E. Turkey, Syria and Iraq she took photographs of places which are now modernized, damaged or altogether destroyed. These have now been digitized at Beth Mardutho Syriac Institute at Piscataway, New Jersey.

Selected publications

Beads