Raymond Allchin

The following obituary first appeared in The Times on 9 June 2010.

Raymond Allchin: archaeologist and cultural historian, born on 9 July 1923, died on 4 June 2010, aged 86.

Although Sir Mortimer Wheeler (who encouraged him) had been director-general of archaeology in India from 1944 to 1948, and Professor Stuart Piggott had written the first popular book on India as it was before Partiton for Penguin, the dramatic and diverse human past of the British Empire’s largest nation had failed to catch the public imagination in Britain in the way that Egypt and the Middle East had done for decades.

Allchin quietly countered this neglect, teaching many Cambridge students and bringing Indian and Pakistani archaeologists to Cambridge to widen their education. He also carried out fieldwork in the sub-continent, and his interests extended into Afghanistan and other parts of South Asia.

Frank Raymond Allchin was born in Harrow, northwest London, in 1923, to Frank MacDonald Allchin and Louise Maude Wright. He was educated at Durston House, Ealing, and Westminster School. He was destined for Oxford, but the outbreak of war in 1939 changed his family circumstances and in 1940 he went instead to the Regent Street Polytechnic School of Architecture. By the time he was called up for war service in 1943 he had gained the equivalent of the intermediate examination of RIBA. The architectural skills he learnt later stood him in good stead in recording ancient sites.

In 1944 he was posted to India with the Royal Corps of Signals. There, his career took a further change of direction, for, like so many of his generation, the time in India with his regiment kindled an enduring interest in the sub-continent, its history and archaeology, culture and languages. Instead of completing his professional qualifications as an architect, he went to the School of Oriental and African Studies at London University and in 1950, he graduated with a first in Hindi and Sanskrit.

He stayed at SOAS to complete a PhD in Indian archaeology in 1954, and taught there until 1959. He then succeeded Dr Johanna van Lohuizen-de Leeuw as lecturer in Indian Art and Archaeology at Cambridge, based in the Department of Oriental Studies rather than in Archaeology and Anthropology.

This had the unfortunate effect of separating Indian archaeology (as well as that of China, taught by Cheng Te-Kun) from the mainstream of the discipline and its theoretical debates, although a number of students from the archaeology department attended Allchin’s lectures and an Indian option was part of the archaeology tripos.

Allchin remained at Cambridge for the rest of his career, becoming a Fellow of Churchill College in 1963 and Reader in Indian Studies in 1972. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1981 and later appointed Emeritus Reader in Indian studiesÍ his failure to attain a personal chair surprised his colleagues. He published numerous articles and archaeological reports and, although primarily an archaeologist, brought to bear on his work the interests and talents of an architect, historian and linguist. All that he did was grounded firmly in season after season of archaeological fieldwork.

Allchin wrote for a wider readership also. His first monograph, Neolithic Cattle Keepers of South India, is written in a way which makes its subject (“This is a book about cow-dung,” begins his first sentence) accessible to the non-specialist and relates his archaeological findings to wider concerns in Indian cultural history. With his wife, Bridget (who, a scholar herself, aptly complemented his own archaeological skills and interests with hers in the earlier periods of India’s past), he wrote an important, up-to-date survey of the archaeology of the sub-continent, The Birth of Indian Civilization (1968), revised in 1982 as The Rise of Civilisation in India and Pakistan. These works are among his most important and enduring published legacies, along with his distinguished translation of Tulsi Das’s Kavitavali and, with collaborators, his multivolume Source Book of Indian Archaeology and Archaeology of Early Historic South Asia. In 1978 he and Norman Hammond edited the pioneering The Archaeology of Afghanistan, the first survey of that country’s complex past.

In the early 1970s, with some of the most distinguished European archaeological scholars in the South Asian field (van Lohuizen-de Leeuw, Jean-Marie Casal, Herbert Hrtel, Maurizio Taddei and others), the Allchins founded the biennial Conference of South Asian Archaeologists in Western Europe. Its first, small conference at Churchill College in 1970 was followed by a larger meeting there in 1971 which yielded the first volume of South Asian Archaeology under Hammond’s editorship and set the scene for an unbroken series of highly significant, large meetings that continue to the present.

Successive meetings were held in different European countries, and their proceedings, each titled South Asian Archaeology with the addition of the year in question, were edited and published by the host scholars, including most of the founding group. The conference (of which Bridget Allchin was for three decades secretary-general) grew to be the most important gathering of its kind in the Western world and South Asian Archaeology a vital and timely record of work in the field.

Allchin served on many national and international committees, focused often on Unesco and the British Academy. These activities were concerned largely with conservation of the international cultural heritage, and fostering interest and active participation in archaeology in the sub-continent. He was, for many years, a joint director, with members of the University of Peshawar Department of Archaeology, of an important archaeological expedition to Pakistan, a successor group of which is active in the field there to this day.

In Cambridge he made substantial contributions to an essential reform of the oriental studies tripos, and was chairman of the faculty at a particularly trying time in the early 1980s. Declining student numbers obliged him to face with realism the loss to the oriental tripos of courses and lecturers. He took the line, however, that the subjects themselves need not die. Thanks to that stand, the study of the archaeology of the Indian sub-continent at Cambridge continues to prosper under his successors.

In the late 1970s, with his wife Bridget, Johanna van Lohuizen-de Leeuw, her husband Jan and Professor Sir Harold Bailey, he created the Cambridge-based Ancient India and Iran Trust, which brought together for permanent scholarly use in one place the highly important libraries and photograph archives of its distinguished founders. It continues to flourish in influence and activity.

Everything Allchin did — academic or otherwise (he maintained successful family business interests in Norfolk) — was characterised by immense enthusiasm. He was a positive and creative person and for many years kept alive and active in this country a scholarly interest in sub-continental archaeology. This achievement is one of his most important academic legacies. His successors in this expanding field, in Britain and abroad, have just cause to be grateful to him for that outstanding contribution.

He was married to Bridget Gordon FSA in 1951; she, and their son and daughter survive him.

The following obituary first appeared in The Guardian on 28 July 2010.

Frank Raymond Allchin, archaeologist and writer, was born on 9 July 1923 and died on 4 June 2010. He was a leading figure in the archaeology and culture of India and the sub-continent

Raymond Allchin at the stupa of Butkara, Swat, Pakistan. He explored the culture from which the region’s earliest cities came

The archaeologist Raymond Allchin, who has died aged 86, first became fascinated with the cultural history of India while stationed there with the Royal Corps of Signals towards the end of the second world war. Indian partition and independence in 1947 threatened to extinguish British involvement in the study of the region's archaeology, but Raymond did much to sustain it by training generations of lecturers, field archaeologists and curators, first at the School of Oriental and African Studies (Soas) in London, and then at Cambridge University.

He was also active in the field, his first independent project tackling the problem of the interpretation of the ash mounds in Mysore and Andhra Pradesh, in southern India. These enigmatic circular mounds survived up to 10 metres in height and were known to be formed of alternating layers of ash and vitrified materials. Some previous investigators had suggested that they were the sites of medieval iron-working.

Raymond selected one of the best-preserved, Utnur, and began to excavate. In a single season in 1957, he cut through metres of cinder and ash, and discovered that the mounds were formed by series of superimposed burnt circular stockades. Disproving the medieval hypothesis, he dated them far earlier, to the neolithic of south India (c3000BC), on account of the associated polished stone axes.

He interpreted them as annual cattle camps, whose accumulations of dung were burnt at the end of each grazing season, thus creating a regular sequence of ash and cinder. This discovery allowed him to distinguish a distinct cultural sequence for peninsular India from its neolithic to its iron-age megalithic cemeteries, as well as providing him with the opening to his report Neolithic Cattle-keepers of South India (1963): "This is a book about cow-dung, or rather the ash of cow-dung."

Raymond later developed a keen interest in the archaeology of the early historic period (c900BC-AD350), notably as to whether the Persian empire had founded the region's earliest cities in the sixth century BC, a model favoured by Sir Mortimer Wheeler. He focused on the early urban evidence from north-west Pakistan and the cultural links between the Taxila valley's sequence of three great early-historic cities – the Bhir Mound, Sirkap and Sirsukh – and the earlier series of megalithic cemeteries in the northern valleys of Swat, Dir and Chitral, collectively termed the Gandharan grave culture. Despite the clear later links between Taxila and those northern valleys, as epitomised by its shared Buddhist Gandharan style of sculpture, earlier evidence remained elusive, until Raymond and his wife, the prehistorian Bridget Gordon, wandered out eastwards from the Taxila site museum one February morning in 1980.

During their walk, they discovered numerous shards of a distinctive, highly burnished red ware at the foot of a spur called Hathial. Raymond immediately recognised that these shards belonged to the burnished red ware associated with the Gandharan grave culture, and dating to the beginning of the first millennium BC. By demonstrating the presence of a substantial settlement at the site, he concluded that the urban sequence of Taxila, and by extension south Asia, was under way long before Persian contact, going back to the late chalcolithic (copper age) and iron age.

Raymond made his work accessible through a series of sole, joint and edited publications. The Birth of Indian Civilisation (1968), written with Bridget, remained popular, being superseded only by their books The Rise of Indian Civilisation in India and Pakistan (1982) and The Archaeology of Early Historic South Asia (1995). His research interests beyond archaeology ranged from his critical translation of Tulsi Das's Sanskrit classic Kavitavali to epigraphy – the study of inscriptions – and the Indian origins of distillation.

Such work attracted research students and postdoctoral fellows from across the UK and Asia to Raymond's office in Cambridge, filled with shards, sculpture and a particularly large and animated scene of an Indic hell. He was never surprised by new or unexpected archaeological results, and this, combined with his suspicion of theoretical trends, kept his mind open and his publications up to date.

Born in Harrow, north-west London, Raymond was educated at Westminster school and had enrolled at the Regent Street Polytechnic to train as an architect when he was posted to India in 1944. On his return, he embarked on a BA in Hindi and Sanskrit at Soas, followed by a PhD in 1954, the year he was appointed a lecturer in Indian archaeology there. He moved to Cambridge in 1959 and, following a career of fieldwork and research across India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, retired with the title of emeritus reader in south Asian archaeology in 1989. He was appointed a fellow of the British Academy in 1981.

He committed the next two decades to the work of the Ancient India and Iran Trust, providing visiting academics and students with open access to books, lectures, seminars, debates and tea parties.

Raymond and Bridget were married in 1951. She survives him, as do their children, Sushila and William.