Nicolas Coldstream

Elected 5 March 1964

John Nicholas Coldstream, archaeologist, was born on 30 March 1927. He died on 21 March 2008, aged 80.

The following obituary was first published in The Times on 9 April 2008, with a photograph.

Professor Nicolas Coldstream was one of the world's leading Classical archaeologists, and a pianist of distinction. His chief field of interest was Greece in the early Iron Age, that is the centuries leading up to the full flowering of the Greek city state. From this central focus his work ranged throughout the Mediterranean. His clarity of thought, outstanding knowledge of his material, based on handling large quantities of it, and the humane spirit in which he wrote and taught guarantee an enduring legacy.

John Nicolas Coldstream was born in 1927. He was educated in Classics at Eton and King's College, Cambridge, and after National Service (the Buffs and Highland Light Infantry) he held appointments at Shrewsbury School and the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities of the British Museum, before beginning his academic career at the University of London.

He was first at Bedford College (1960-83), becoming Professor of Aegean Archaeology, and then at University College. There he was Yates Professor of Classical Art and Archaeology and subsequently an honorary Fellow. His courses and his always engaging teaching were treasured by many at all levels and successive generations of Greek and Cypriot postgraduates were inspired by him and his philhellenic sympathies at the start of their careers. Some of this affection was expressed in Klados (1995), a volume of studies in his honour edited by Christine Morris, with papers by no fewer than 26 former research students.

In 1957 Coldstream began his long association with the British School at Athens, eventually becoming chairman of its then managing committee and ultimately a vice-president. From this research base he studied the disciplined Greek pottery of the Geometric Period, that is the 10th to the early 7th centuries BC. He mastered all its local styles and their distribution, from the Near East to Sicily. Greek Geometric Pottery was published in 1968 and remains a large and irreplaceable masterwork. Fortunately he was able to complete a revised edition recently, incorporating abundant new discoveries.

His subsequent seminal book, Geometric Greece (1977), remains, in the words of a senior Greek scholar, unsurpassed by any other study of the period. This too has a revised, updated edition (2003). The richness of its engagement with the complex, multi-ethnic material culture of the Greek, eastern and central Mediterranean Iron Age worlds, based on acute observation, very wide knowledge and perceptive historical judgment, is precisely what enables new questions to be asked of the material.

Agency theory is currently fashionable in archaeology. Without such constructs Coldstream in fact always delighted in recovering ancient actions and choices of individual artists, potters and traders, Cretans, Euboeans, Cypriots and Phoenicians in particular, importing and exporting their wares. Thus, as Vassos Karageorghis has pointed out, his suggestion that Phoenician unguent manufacturers set up shop on Kos and Rhodes, commissioning locally made perfume bottles of Phoenician type for their trade. Again, at Knossos the extraordinary imagination and humour of particular Iron Age potters and painters was delightedly communicated. From all this Coldstream never eschewed moving to broad historical conclusions.

Two ancient sites stand out in his work. One is the island of Kythera. Here Coldstream and his friend Professor George Huxley excavated part of a Minoan (Cretan Bronze Age) settlement at Kastri, discovered in the 1930s by Sylvia Benton, of the British School. In the subsequent volume, Kythera. Excavations and Studies (1972), Coldstream was responsible for the Minoan pottery, which comprises much of the text. Countless studies of Minoan pottery, within Crete or on other Aegean islands, make reference to this work.

The second place is Knossos, where his heart lay. He published many fundamental papers and books on Knossian pottery, some of which he had himself excavated and all of which he had personally laid out and studied. The culmination was his co-editorship with H. W. Catling of the four volumes (1996) devoted to the publication, a magisterial work, of the large Iron Age cemetery excavated by the British School for the Greek authorities on the site of what was to become the medical faculty of the University of Crete near Knossos. The publication of Cretan pottery requires high-quality technical drawings, sometimes hundreds. Many of those in Coldstream's publications were done by his wife Nicola, the historian of medieval art. They had married in 1970 and Nicolas took as much delight in travelling for her studies as she in support of his work.

In recognition of his academic achievement Coldstream was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1964 and a Fellow of the British Academy in 1977. He was made a member of many foreign academies and an honorary Fellow of the Archaeological Society of Athens. In 2003 he was awarded the British Academy's prestigious Kenyon Medal for Classical Studies. On March 29 a planned day of papers and tributes in his honour in Athens went ahead as an in memoriam meeting.

As a person Nicolas Coldstream was a delight to know. Tall and dignified, wholly unpompous, modest and ever with a gentle twinkle or a good laugh, he was, in a recent Greek tribute (and Greeks know what they mean), the archetypal English gentleman.

Scores of scholars enjoyed the wonderfully generous hospitality and atmosphere he and his wife created in their London home after annual general meetings of the British School and on many another occasion.

Alongside Greece and its archaeology his other great love was music and opera. His tastes were catholic, from Handel through the Classical repertoire and on to Vaughan Williams. At University College he was a member of the music club, performing as a pianist in its concerts; at home too or in others' homes many were enraptured by his playing. It was singularly appropriate that the Coldstreams' house in Ebury Street should bear a plaque commemorating an earlier occupant, Mozart.

His is survived by his wife Nicola Coldstream, FSA

The following obituary was first published in the Daily Telegraph on 4 April 2008, with a photograph.

Professor Nicolas Coldstream, who has died aged 80, was a leading scholar of Greek archaeology and one of its greatest teachers.

His work on the Early Iron Age in Greece, Crete and Cyprus and on the impact of Greek civilisation on the Mediterranean world broke new ground and had a huge influence on generations of scholars. His magnum opus, Greek Geometric Pottery (1968), a painstaking work of description, classification, chronology, and attribution of geometric pottery styles from the entire Greek world, became the ultimate reference work for anyone studying the Geometric period.

But Coldstream did not confine himself to issues of classification, placing his account of pottery design within a historical context. He developed the historical dimension further in Geometric Greece (1977), which remains the standard work on a period which saw the rise of the great Panhellenic sanctuaries, the evolution of the Greek city state, the composition of the Homeric poems and the colonisation by Greek settlers of southern Italy and Sicily.

As a field archaeologist Coldstream conducted excavations at Knossos, at Motya in Sicily (where he studied Greek imports of the 8th century BC), and on the Aegean island of Kythera where, with George Huxley, he led excavations at a putative Cretan colony at the port of Kastri in Palaiopolis. Although he never made any sensational discoveries, his thorough, systematic approach and his ability to synthesise the knowledge based on archaeological finds into a coherent and readable account greatly added to the scholarship of ancient Greece.

As a writer and lecturer Coldstream ranged widely and, although it was for his work on the 9th and 8th centuries BC that he became famous, he took an interest in periods from the Minoan and Protogeometric to the Orientalising and Archaic. His inaugural lecture at Bedford College, where he was appointed lecturer in 1960, was on Aegean religion; and he also wrote or lectured on such diverse subjects as hero cults, nature goddesses, architecture, Homeric epic, the Aristotelian polis, the invention of the Greek alphabet and social status.

At Bedford College, and later at University College London, where he was appointed Yates Professor of Classical Art and Archaeology in 1983, his lectures, always witty, illuminating and jargon-free, attracted students from other universities who, when queried on their attendance would often admit: "We just don't get anything like this."

He encouraged his students to acquire a disciplined and thorough familiarity with the full range of Greek archaeological material as their starting point, and many went on to make notable careers as scholars of Greek and Minoan archaeology and civilisation.

Coldstream tended to view changes in pottery and other design as a reflection of changing taste and fashion or as a matter of individual choice. This brought him some criticism from proponents of a more ideological "New Archaeology" looking for deeper social or economic explanations. But, as Coldstream's admirers tended to point out, this was unfair - not least because, without his painstaking works of description, classification, chronology and so on, the theoreticians would have had little on which to construct their theories. Moreover, although he himself never strayed into the ideological - always emphasising the "provisional" nature of his interpretations - he encouraged his students to develop their own theoretical or methodological approaches.

John Nicolas Coldstream was born on March 30 1927 at Lahore, in what was then British India, where his father, Sir John Coldstream, was serving as a judge. After Eton and National Service in the Buffs and the Highland Light Infantry in Egypt and Palestine, he went up to King's College, Cambridge, to read Classics, graduating in 1951.

After four years teaching at Shrewsbury School, he worked for a year as a temporary assistant keeper at the British Museum's department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, where he published his first monograph, An Etruscan Neck-Amphora, in 1958. By now fascinated by the archaeology of the Mediterranean world, he went on to carry out research into Geometric pottery as a Macmillan Student at the British School at Athens from 1957 to 1960. He published the results of his first excavation, A Geometric well at Knossos, in 1960.

After six years as a lecturer at Bedford College, London, in 1966 he became a reader, and in 1975 Professor of Aegean Archaeology. He remained at Bedford until his appointment to the chair at UCL in 1983. He retired in 1992.

Though in many ways Coldstream was an archetypal dignified English gentleman, he was totally unstuffy and unsnobbish, and was as happy travelling by bus or mucking in with student communal life on a dig as he was being feted by academies and embassies. A talented pianist, he took an unaffected pleasure in life and got on particularly well with children, treating them with the same seriousness or humour that they themselves showed him.

He served as a member, and chairman from 1987 to 1991, of the managing committee of the British School at Athens and edited the school's Annual from 1968 to 1973. He went on to become vice-president of the school. He died on March 21, shortly before it was due to hold a celebration to mark the publication of a second edition of Greek Geometric Pottery.

Coldstream enjoyed a high reputation abroad, and was a member or honorary member of academies and institutes around the world. He was elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1964 and of the British Academy in 1977. In 2003 he was awarded the academy's Sir Frederick Kenyon Medal for Classical Studies.

Nicolas Coldstream married, in 1970, Nicola Carr (Coldstream), FSA, the eminent historian of medieval architecture and art, who survives him.

The following obituary by our Fellow Gerald Cadogan appeared in the Independent on 15 April 2008, with a photograph.

Professor Nicolas Coldstream: archaeologist and musician: born Lahore, India 30 March 1927; Assistant Master, Shrewsbury School 1952-56; Temporary Assistant Keeper, Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities British Museum 1956-57; Macmillan Student, British School at Athens 1957-60; Lecturer, Bedford College, London University 1960-66, Reader 1966-75, Professor of Aegean Archaeology 1975-83; FBA 1977; Yates Professor of Classical Art and Archaeology, University College London 1983-92 (Emeritus), Honorary Fellow 1993; married 1970 Nicola Carr; died London 21 March 2008. 

The archaeologist Nicolas Coldstream was a brilliant, and pioneering, investigator of Greek culture and history throughout the Mediterranean in the ninth and eighth centuries BC, the era of the early, pre-Classical city states, reintroduction of writing, emergence of the Iliad and Odyssey, start of Greek settlement in Italy and the west Mediterranean, and the first Olympic Games (776 BC).

He approached this seminal period in Western history through analysing and arranging the pottery of the different regions of Greece so as to create a framework for history and comparative study, that all have used ever since it appeared 40 years ago in his masterpiece Greek Geometric Pottery. ("Geometric" is the standard label for the pottery style he elucidated.) Study of pottery did not rest there. A workaholic, he kept adding to our understanding through articles, chapters and lectures until his sudden death, just days before the second edition came out, taking account of new finds and ideas since 1968. Pottery led on to early Greek history, where he wrote another extraordinary synthesis: Geometric Greece (1977, with its second edition in 2003).

As a scholar in the humanities, much of his authority came from a scientific sense of how "provisional" (his word in one preface) his – or anybody else's – ideas were. His writings show modesty, especially before the achievements of those Greeks of long ago in which he took an almost personal pride, a sense of involved irony that could move into empathetic playfulness about the ancient craftsmen and their patrons, and deep enthusiasm. To these add an elegant prose style, constant lucidity while aiming to let the reader judge for himself, and an excellent eye (the painter William Coldstream was his "Cousin Bill") and visual recall. I saw this first in the Thebes Museum in the mid-1960s. The guards would not allow him to sketch some Geometric pots, on the grounds they were unpublished. We left for a kafeneio. "Don't speak," he said – and promptly wrote out his notes, and drew sketches, from memory. Then it was time for ouzo.

Coldstream enjoyed being a son of the Raj, born in Lahore where his father was a High Court judge. But it entailed being sent back to prep school: he hated St Cyprian's, Eastbourne, as George Orwell had earlier (but Cyril Connolly quite liked it – see Enemies of Promise on "St Wulfric's").

Like both of them, he was then a King's Scholar at Eton, where a heavyweight election included the future Lords Kingsdown and Armstrong of Ilminster, and Sir Peter Swinnerton-Dyer. Coldstream found the institution tolerable only in his last years; one master, Francis Cruso, especially encouraged him in music. National Service in Egypt and Palestine was followed by King's College, Cambridge, where he took a double First in Classics, and there was much music.

Four years of teaching classics at Shrewsbury marked time before a one-year post at the British Museum, where he discovered the joy and challenge of Geometric pottery. So he started three years of research on this pottery at the British School at Athens, the UK's oldest foreign research institute, where he also began a deep connection with Knossos, taking on the excavation of the Sanctuary of Demeter under the School's Director, Sinclair Hood, and following the lead of Humfry Payne, James Brock and Vincent Desborough in showing by the practical ways of archaeology the long and important afterlife/continuation of the former Minoan capital. His 1973 publication of the shrine (Knossos: the sanctuary of Demeter) is a paradigm of how to identify an otherwise anonymous deity from the material remains of the cult ritual.

Coldstream returned to a lectureship at Bedford College, London, which led eventually to a chair, before moving to University College in 1983 as the Yates Professor of Classical Art and Archaeology. In both places he was renowned as a brilliant lecturer, teacher and supervisor, patient, clear and kind. If in his writing and lecturing he quietly emphasised the importance of not being a determinist but allowing for human quirkiness in explaining ancient culture and behaviour, he was the same teaching his students in encouraging them, and showing them how, to look at the evidence for themselves and realise that their ideas could be quite as valid as any professor's. Many were from Greece and Cyprus, whose people and places he loved. Many have contributed greatly to scholarship, thanks to his starting them off. Many now have senior posts. All loved him.

In 1963 he joined George Huxley in excavating an offshore Minoan settlement on the island of Kythera, between Crete and the Peloponnese, where – as usual – he made order out of the levels of Bronze Age occupation and their pottery, while the two of them followed the then new approach of describing an island world and the changing interactions of people and place diachronically through all antiquity, rather than hiving them off into artificial segments that had no relationship with each other.

In 1970 he married Nicola (Nicky) Carr, FSA, a leading scholar of medieval architecture and art, in a blessed union of minds and hearts that meant plenty of expeditions to Gothic buildings across the continent and as far as Cyprus, which offered research topics for both of them. In London they lived in the house where Mozart had stayed as a boy and, later, Vita Sackville-West lived. Whether for visiting foreign scholars or friends up from the country or from across town, their hospitality, chat, laughter, serious food and wine, and the chance of some music were a magnet, all the more for being so close to Victoria bus and train stations.

Knossos still called. A massive excavation in the late 1970s of its main Early Iron Age cemetery under Hector Catling, FSA, Director of the Athens School, led to an equally massive, and lucid, joint publication by Coldstream and Catling in 1996 (Knossos North Cemetery), after years of study visits by the Coldstreams, when Nicolas marshalled the vases – in their thousands – and Nicky drew them. It is a demanding task, but drawings often make clearer presentations than photographs.

Honours and invitations for prestigious lectures flowed, especially from the continent. Honorary doctorates could redeem no PhD: in the 1960s they were not always essential for a university career. A Fellow of the British Academy since 1977, in 2003 he received its Kenyon Medal for Classical Studies.

From Coldstream's teens, music mattered almost as much as archaeology: he played the piano in University College concerts and from 1984, realising his technique could improve, for over 20 years had a lesson every six to eight weeks with Ruth Nye of the Yehudi Menuhin School and the Royal College of Music. The formality of music matched his love of the formal Geometric style.

Nicolas Coldstream enjoyed company and rarely seemed without a twinkle, or deep laugh in commenting on egregious behaviour. He was quick to produce texts and exceptional in readily taking on tiring unpaid tasks, such as editing publications for the British School at Athens, or being chairman of and organising the big five-yearly conference of classical archaeologists when it came to London. He was always in demand for writing references. No surprise. He brought out the best in so many people, especially his students.

The following obituary, written by Alan Johnston, was first published in the Guardian on 4 July 2008

Nicolas Coldstream: distinguished scholar and author

Nicolas Coldstream, who has died aged 80, was one of the leading scholars of Greek archaeology of his generation. Through both his publications and his teaching, he made the early Iron Age in Hellenic lands - the period c1000 to 700BC, which saw the emergence of the Greek city state - his own.

Born in Lahore, now in Pakistan, the son of a high court judge who was working there, he came to the subject after studying classics at Eton and King's College, Cambridge, national service with the Buffs and Highland Light Infantry in Egypt and Palestine, and a spell of teaching at Shrewsbury school (1952-56). A year was spent in the Greek and Roman department of the British Museum (1956-57), and he then became Macmillan student at the British School in Athens (1957-60), from where he moved to Bedford College, London, as lecturer. He was awarded a personal chair in Aegean archaeology in 1975 and, in 1983, became Yates professor of classical art and archaeology at University College London (UCL).

He retired in 1992, having become an honorary fellow, but continued his connections with the college, not least with the chamber music society. The last thing he did there was to present a lecture for the inauguration of the AG Leventis gallery of Cypriot and eastern Mediterranean archaeology last November. Coldstream trained an impressive number of postgraduate students, now to be found from Dublin to Nicosia. Many contributed to a festschrift in 1995; more unusually, he co-authored, in 1993, an account of a Cypriot tomb group, housed in the Institute of Archaeology collection, with his 10-strong MA class in Cypriot archaeology, the only one then offered in Britain.

Articles poured from his pen on a range of topics that demonstrated the breadth of his interest and knowledge - ranging from Tyre in the Levant to Huelva in Spain - often focusing on the most recent important finds, such as at Pithekoussai on the island of Ischia and Lefkandi on Euboia. His own excavational work concentrated on Kythera, where, with George Huxley, he pioneered research on the connections between Crete and the Greek mainland in the Bronze Age, and his beloved Knossos, a rich site long after Minos; all of this he saw to publication, as well as much dug by others at Knossos - witness the four-volume Knossos North Cemetery: Early Greek Tombs, co-edited with Hector Catling (1996).

The core to Coldstream's work was the study of the pottery of the earlier first millennium BC. His Greek Geometric Pottery (1968), or GGP as it is known in the trade, will only be surpassed by a second edition. Nor was the broader view neglected; in 2003 he published a second edition of Geometric Greece (1977), where he tackled the history of the period, perforce dependent largely on archaeological evidence, with a clarity and freedom from jargon which was always a hallmark of his approach.

The excavations at Knossos were conducted under the aegis of the British School at Athens, which Coldstream served as editor of the annual, chairman of the managing committee, and then vice-president. He was about to set off to a colloquium in his honour in Athens (involving many of his former pupils) when he died. It became a fitting, and academically impressive, memorial meeting.

Coldstream did not seek administrative work, but he took on at short notice the organisation of the 11th international conference of classical archaeology at UCL in 1978, which became the only British Academy-sponsored event then to make a profit. No connection, however, should be made with his election to a fellowship, in 1977.

One of his great strengths was his humanity - he was fully at ease with all, from child to peer. He was also an excellent smoother of ruffled feathers; when chairing a conference session at the British Museum, he was able to snatch a break during a heated argument between two Italian colleagues on a relatively obscure Etruscan matter to announce that it was time for lunch. He also sought to defuse acrimony in several articles on the thorny issue of the contribution of Greek pottery to the dating of sites in the Holy Land.

He left a body of work in progress, involving the second edition of GGP, and the full publication of the pottery of "his" period in the British Museum. As always, his texts are illustrated by his wife Nicola, a leading scholar of medieval architecture and art, whom he married in 1970. They lived in a house in Ebury Street, Belgravia, once occupied by Mozart. She survives him.