In comparison with so many of her contemporaries, she exuded sexuality. The fact that she has been described as the David Attenborough of her time (he apparently has credited her, incongruously enough, with encouraging his childhood fossil collection) belies her smoulderingly sexual side.

Her interest in sex was overpowering. This is clear from her work, her writings and, above all, her life. The epic scope of that life is revealed in a new collection of over 1,000 documents, kept alongside Priestley's own archive at Bradford University and now open to the public for the first time. Frank and fascinating, they illuminate some of the ambiguities of Jacquetta's life and shed light on the mores of Britain's post-war literary elite. It wasn't all grey skies, donkey jackets and CND marches. Forget David Attenborough: Jacquetta had rather more in common with Anaïs Nin. And like Nin, she was interested in women as well as men.

Now moved to the archive, a journal she scribbled in while a Cambridge undergraduate shows her first relationships were with women. Jealous and confused in her pursuit of a friend, Peggy Lamert, she wrote: "a wild craze seized me . . . I cried and cried — impossible to stop it.
I seemed to be one enormous void."

Years later, in 1939, as a married woman and mother, she turned to the same journal: "I believe this was the strongest emotional episode of my life — possibly it always will be. I should like to know how far my marriage to Christopher [Hawkes] was due to my reaction from this." And: "I know now that I have homosexual tendencies at least mentally and emotionally; I have never had much desire for any physical contact but I recognise it's there as very occasionally I have dreams. It is going off gradually I think, but I shall always be more interested in women than men. And yet I am a successful lover."

More evidence of her preoccupations is found elsewhere in the archive. Are her manuscripts, set down in her hard-to-read handwriting, meant to be entirely serious? Her script for Figures in a Landscape, an experimental film, starts: "Cornwall, a horn of rock, Cornwall is England's horn,
Its point thrust out into the sea, Smooth or ribbed with waves . . ."

Jacquetta was born on August 5, 1910, to Jessie, a nurse, and Frederick Gowland Hopkins, a Cambridge don who was widely regarded as the father of modern biochemistry. As a teenager in 1929, when her father received the Nobel prize for medicine, she charmed the Sweden's crown prince. She would later blossom into a woman of impeccable grooming and discerning taste.

In 1980 her two passions — archeology and sex — came together when she published her book A Quest of Love. But since then she has been regarded with disdain by the archeological establishment. Her work has been ignored; she traded the world of academe for the flimflam preoccupations of popular celebrity — and the world of academe never forgave her.

Jacquetta's unorthodoxy had taken the best part of a lifetime to gestate. The young Jacquetta, raised alongside an older brother and sister, was a tomboy in a happy family home. As a teenager, she had no interest in sex: "I was not fascinated by my faeces or nipples. I had absolutely no knowledge of masturbation or desire for such manipulations of myself or anyone else."

At Newnham College, Cambridge, where she was among the first female undergraduates to study archeology and anthropology, she was presented with two serious suitors, one of whom, Christopher Hawkes, was to propose. She later said that "as an undergraduate I was still unaroused", but she had urges for women there more serious than "pashes". In her diary, she later recorded her relief that she was not homosexual.

At 21, on an excavation assignment in Palestine and still a virgin , she experienced the first of what is best described as a series of trance-like episodes. Alone on Mount Carmel, she was mesmerised by the moonlit procession of a camel train: "My memory of it is dreamlike, yet embodies one of the most intense sensuous and emotional experiences of my life . . ." During the dig, she wrote that she was intensely moved at uncovering a Neanderthal skeleton; more powerful was the sense of "ecstasy" she felt while wandering near her camp. "An intense exaltation took possession of me. It was as though the white goddess of the moon had thrown some bewitching power with her rays." On Jacquetta's return to England she accepted Hawkes's proposal. He was seen as quite a catch.

At first, Christopher and Jacquetta seemed the perfect match: two brilliant archeologists in their twenties, writing together (their joint work, Prehistoric Britain, was well received). But the marriage was flawed from the start. As they set off on honeymoon, Jacquetta called out to the best man: "I wish you were coming with us." Her mother-in-law-to-be had dominated the wedding arrangements, but as Jacquetta walked down the aisle in a satin-and-gold gown, she was determined to retain some control — she was wearing a contraceptive device (in the 1930s she had worked at a pioneering birth-control clinic in Islington).

Possibly too much information, but Jacquetta revealed it to readers of A Quest of Love. The honeymoon in Majorca "was neither a joy nor a disaster. Christopher made ambitious preparations for our union, insisting that our twin beds should be changed for a huge cama matrimonial. The small hotel was shaken by the tramping and banging of the removal and installation". That appeared to be all that moved. "We never ventured beyond what I believe is called the European position."