This article aims to provide an initial analysis of the early connections between Christopher Hawkes and Spanish archaeology in the context of his participation in two of the international summer courses in Ampurias in 1947 and 1950. The documentation used for this article comes mainly from the Pericot Archive in the Library of Catalonia, in which there are 43 letters from Hawkes to Pericot between 1940 and 1975. In addition, other correspondence in the British Museum and in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs will be mentioned. This study forms part of a larger project of recovering the memory of twentieth-century British-Spanish relations, of which a first phase has centred on the assessment of Gordon Childe’s contacts with Spain (Díaz-Andreu 1998; forthcoming–a; forthcoming–b). As in Gordon Childe’s case, all memory of Hawkes’ visits, and indeed of his relationships with Spanish archaeologists, has since been lost. Unfortunately, this situation is not exceptional: most of the links between Spanish archaeologists and British and American archaeologists in the twenty years around the Spanish Civil War have dropped out of archaeological memory. To the names mentioned in a recent seminar (Gordon Childe, Edward Thurlow Leeds, Eoin MacWhite, Hubert Savory) (Armada Pita 2006), many others could be added. As this article will show, however, there were many contacts and these help to explain some developments in the archaeological thinking and practice of the participants involved in these exchanges, as well as some events in the international organisation of archaeology.