Alexander Peter Detsicas, M.A., D.Litt., F.S.A.Scot

Alec Detsicas was born in Athens in 1926 and went to school there. He emerged steeped in classical Greek culture and history and, as a schoolboy and youth, was fiercely patriotic. His love of Greece survived the war, occupation and civil war between 1939 and 1946, and led him to join a resistance movement during the German occupation. But, bitterly disillusioned by the internecine conflicts among his countrymen, he left for Paris where he studied for two years at the Sorbonne. In 1948 he made his final move, this time to England to read French at Durham University. Detsicas was fortunate to be a member of Hatfield College at Durham during the Mastership of Professor Eric Birley who encouraged his budding interest in archaeology. In 1958 Detsicas returned briefly to the north-east to participate in Birley’s excavation at Corbridge where he got his first taste of Samian studies from Birley and of coarse pottery from John Gillam. Detsicas was to become a recognized expert on both. Meanwhile, in 1952 he began his career as a modern languages teacher, first in London and then in Kent, his adopted county and subsequently switched to teaching archaeology. He lost no time in joining the Kent Archaeological Society and served it faithfully until his health began to fail towards the end of his life. His major excavation was the important villa-estate of the Medway Valley, Rowe Place Farm, Eccles, on which interim reports appeared regularly in Archaeologia Cantiana. In 1968, with another schoolmaster, Arthur Harrison, FSA, Detsicas initiated an annual training excavation on this site. They taught excavation techniques, methods of surveying and field recording and persuaded archaeologists of the highest calibre to give lectures on and off the site for the eight-seasons duration of the project. Another schoolmasterly activity was Detsicas’s editorial work for the KAS. He was appointed honorary editor of Archaeologia Cantiana in 1970 and was responsible for the subsequent thirty volumes – a record for the Society. He also contributed editorially to the Monograph and Records series of publications and in 1983 published the standard reference work on Roman Kent, The Cantiaci, in The Peoples of Roman Britain series. When Detsicas retired from teaching in the late 1980s he applied himself to post-excavation work on the Eccles Roman Villa. He had amassed an immense archive of artefacts and documents in pre-computer days but, such was the thoroughness and methodology of his recording, it was perfectly feasible to undertake the computerisation of the field records to begin to create an Eccles database. Sadly, Detsicas was unable to continue his work as his health began to fail but it is hoped that the project will be completed by members of the Kent Archaeological Society. Detsicas died on 24 December 1999.