Professor Stuart Piggott. C.B.E., B.Litt., D.Litt.Hum., F.B.A.

Stuart Piggott was born on 28 May 1910 and educated at Churcher's College, Petersfield. A precocious child, he wrote the prehistory of Petersfield when he was fourteen; by sixteen he was an active field archaeologist; seventeen saw him working in Reading Museum and at eighteen he was appointed an investigator with the R.C.H.M. in Wales, a post he owed to O. G. S. Crawford, then director of the Ordnance Survey Archaeology Division, who had recognized his talent. Piggott's five years in Wales were not entirely happy, although he was himself half Welsh through his mother. Fieldwork in Anglesey provided necessary experience in surveying and recording but he never warmed to the North Wales landscape and, above all, he could not tolerate the petty officialdom of government service. However, the Welsh years were productive: Piggott always wrote easily and lucidly and had published a dozen papers in learned journals before he was twenty. His study of `The Neolithic pottery of the British Isles' in Arch. J. (1931) was a seminal essay in which his later major work, The Neolithic Cultures of the British Isles (1954), was rooted. In 1934 Piggott returned to the Wiltshire chalk as deputy to the wealthy, eccentric archaeologist, Alexander Keiller, at the Neolithic site he had bought at Windmill Hill, near Avebury. This project occupied Piggott until 1938 and resulted in his highly original study of the Bronze Age in Wessex published in P.P.S. (1938) in which he postulated Mycenean influence on prehistoric Wessex. During this time he obtained the Diploma of the Institute of Archaeology of London University and also excavated at Little Woodbury with Bersu, and, in 1939, at Stonehenge. (In view of the present controversy over the visitor facilities at Stonehenge, it is interesting to recall Keiller's offer in the 1930s to organize, staff and build an unobtrusive sunken museum near the monument. The scheme met with opposition although Keiller guaranteed the money to buy the surrounding land.) On the outbreak of war Piggott enlisted in the ranks of an anti-aircraft battery in Salisbury but, largely through luck, was transferred to the Intelligence Corps. Initially based in southern England, he was able to dig at Ram's Hill with his wife, Peggy (afterwards Guido) but in 1942 he was posted to India with prehistorians Glyn Daniel and Terence Powell and ended the war as lieutenant-colonel in charge of military air-photographic intelligence for south-east Asia. When military duties permitted, Piggott assembled material for his two books, Some Ancient Cities of India (1946) and Prehistoric India (1950). Demobilized in 1945 he went up to St John's College, Oxford, to read for a B.Litt. on the work of William Stukeley, having become familiar over the years with the early eighteenth-century surveys of Avebury and Stonehenge which Keiller had bought in 1924. But before Piggott could submit his thesis he was invited to succeed Gordon Childe as Abercromby Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology at Edinburgh in 1946, a chair he held until retirement in 1977. The hills and lakes of Scotland left Piggott as cold as had those of north Wales and, though he excavated the hill-top henge at Cairnpapple, near Linlithgow, and the Dalladies long barrow, near Montrose, archaeologically and emotionally his heart belonged to Wessex. Nevertheless, he was a loyal servant to his university and to Scottish antiquarianism. He served long terms on the Ancient Monuments Board for Scotland, as a trustee of the National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland and as a commissioner on the R.C.H.M. (Scotland). He organized the exhibition of Celtic art at the Royal Museum of Scotland for the 1970 Edinburgh Festival and played a key role in mounting the university library exhibition, `Three Centuries of Scottish Archaeology', to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Abercromby chair. He published Scotland Before History (1958, revised edition 1982) and edited The Prehistoric Peoples of Scotland (1962), but he returned regularly to Wiltshire to undertake major excavations with Professor Richard Atkinson at Stonehenge in 1953 and at two Megalithic tombs, Wayland's Smithy and the West Kennet long barrow in 1955. Also, in the footsteps of his predecessor at Edinburgh, Piggott travelled widely to continental sites and European prehistory figured prominently in his teaching and writing. Ancient Europe appeared in 1965, followed in 1983 by his arresting publication, The First Wheeled Transport from the Atlantic to the Caspian Sea, again developed from an earlier paper he wrote for P.P.S. in 1968 in which he attributed the invention of wheels to Sumeria c. 3000 BC. This was followed in 1992 by Wagon, Chariot and Carriage, a comparison of the early Caucasian chariots with those of China. Mention must be made of Piggott's long association with the Prehistoric Society and its Proceedings. In 1935 he was one of the `young Turks' who attended the strategically-timed meeting in Norwich at which the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia was transformed into the [national] Prehistoric Society. He helped to give it a flying start with four contributions to volume I of the Proceedings, followed by ten in the next three volumes. He was its president from 1962-6. Piggott retired to his cottage in Oxfordshire in 1977 soon after his 65th birthday which was celebrated by the publication of a Festschrift, To Illustrate the Monuments (1976). The frontispiece was a drawing by John Piper of the megalithic tomb of Pentre Ifan, John Betjeman wrote a dedicatory poem and archaeologists from Britain, east and west Europe and the U.S.A. contributed papers. Piggott was a member of the Antiquaries' Council in 1946 and Gold Medallist in 1983. During vacations and retirement he visited Burlington House frequently, exchanging the latest gossip with John Hopkins in the library, though he had a superb collection of books at West Challow. Gregarious, hospitable and approachable, Piggott kept open house for visitors when arthritis restricted his travelling and he always found solace in reading on all manner of subjects, way beyond the confines of archaeology. He was a published poet, Fire Among the Ruins, 1942-5, being followed by contributions to Modern Verse 1900-50 and by translations of a selection of Martial's epigrams. He died on 23 September 1996.