George Brian Rogers, Docteur es Lettres

George Rogers was born in Hull on 19 September 1931 and went to Malet Lambert High School in the town. His mother, headmistress of a local school, died when he was ten and his father remarried. On leaving school Rogers enlisted in the Royal Air Force as a radar fitter, trained as an electronics engineer and taught radar and mathematics until he left the RAF in 1961. Meanwhile, in 1958 in France, he had married a young French woman and the pair proved to be perfect partners. Rogers joined IBM immediately on quitting the service and the family (there were now two daughters) lived in the north London suburbs until he transferred to IBM in Paris in 1965. After eighteen months he moved within the company again, this time to La Gaude, near Nice, where he remained until retirement in 1992.

From boyhood, Rogers had been interested in Roman archaeology and, when helping on digs and attending summer schools, his enthusiasm and ability, particularly in ceramics and numismatics, attracted the attention of some of the leading archaeologists of the day in both countries. He was a regular attendee at the field archaeology courses at Wroxeter, organized by Dr Graham Webster for Birmingham University, at which lecturers included the likes of Professor Ian Richmond and Dr Philip Corder, among many others. Soon after their marriage in 1958, Rogers and his wife attended the course, coinciding with a visit to the site from Sir Mortimer Wheeler, much to their excitement. In Oxford, Dr Grace Simpson became a firm friend who was always more than willing to share her scholarship and advice with Rogers, who reciprocated when she was preparing her joint publication with J A Stanfield, Les Potiers de la Gaule Centrale (1990). During his national service Richard Linington, who was later to become director of Etruscan Studies at the Lerici Foundation in Rome, assisted Rogers with his dig at Locking on the RAF site where they were posted. On moving to Paris, Rogers lost no time in meeting French archaeologists and took part in the Guiry en Vexin excavations, where he met Dr Colette Bémont, Directeur de Recherches au CNRS, an expert on Roman ceramics. They worked together very profitably, each producing a number of important papers while Rogers spent much of his free time studying and drawing decorated sigilatta sherds and vases in the Museum of St Germain en Laye for his future book on Central Gaulish potters, Poteries Sigillees de la Gaule Centrale, I, Les Motifs Non Figures, XXVIIIe supplement to Gallia (1974).

Nice was an excellent centre for an archaeologist and Rogers arrived at a stirring time. Much work was in train in a vast area of the south of France, including Marseilles, Toulon in the Var and Nice, resulting in the investigation of all potential archaeological sites covering proto-historic to later periods. Rogers soon became involved with the Nice Museum of Archaeology, the Museum at Grasse and the Picasso Museum at Antibes. His daughters were now taking part in excavations close to home and the family dug at the site of the Roman olive mills at Peymeinade, the necropolis at Le Brusc near Valbonne and the Ile de Lérins near Cannes. In Fréjus Rogers conducted research for a quarter of a century with Daniel Brentchaloff, curator of the museum, re-identifying sites, coins and ceramics and correcting and updating the records. At the same time he was working on the hoard of some four hundred coins recovered from the Anse St Roch in Antibes, studies which resulted in his doctoral thesis in 1979 and published in Archaeo. Nautica, 3, in 1981. As if this were not enough, he excavated at Lezoux, near Clermont-Ferrand, and later prospected new sites under the auspices of the Lezoux Centre Archéologique. Brian Hartley of Leeds University and John Collis of Sheffield brought parties of students to dig there, alongside others from Tours University, and Rogers introduced them to the use of computers. His last book, Poteries Sigilees de la Gaule Centrale, II, Les Potiers, was published in 1999 and, with a weak heart but an indomitable spirit, he died on 7 October 2000.