Professions

Leslie Alcock (24 April 1925, Manchester — 6 June 2006, Stevenage) was Professor of Archaeology at the University of Glasgow, and one of the leading archaeologists of Dark Age Britain. His major excavations included Dînas Powys in Wales, South Cadbury in Somerset and a series of major hillforts in Scotland.

His intellectual prowess was demonstrated early, when he won a scholarship to Manchester Grammar School in 1935. In 1942, he left school and joined the army to fight in the Second World War as a captain in the Gurkhas. This experience was valuable to him in a number of respects. He became fluent in Urdu and Punjabi, and also developed an interest in archaeology and in the Indian sub-continent as a whole.

After demob in 1946, he won a scholarship to Brasenose College, Oxford, where he read Modern History from 1946 to 1949. He pursued his interest in archaeology through the Oxford Archaeology Society, becoming its president. He met his wife Elizabeth during this period, and they were married in 1950, shortly before he left Britain to become the first director of the Archaeological Survey of Pakistan. He had previously returned to the sub-continent to serve as Sir Mortimer Wheeler’s deputy on the excavations at Mohenjodaro.

This relationship was to prove more valuable than the directorship of the survey, which he left after not being paid for several months. Back in Britain, a short stint as curator at the Abbey House Museum in Leeds in 1952 was followed by a post as a junior lecturer in the Department of Archaeology at Cardiff University. He was to remain in Cardiff for 20 years, rising to the level of Reader, and undertaking his major southern British excavations at Dînas Powys in Wales (Alcock 1963) and South Cadbury (Alcock 1972). During this period, Cardiff was to emerge as one of the powerhouses of archaeology in British universities, and many of the leading figures in British archaeology today encountered Alcock as a teacher at that time.

The South Cadbury really made Alcock’s name. The hillfort had a traditional link with Camelot and the Arthurian legends, and Alcock made sure that the media were aware of his work. The five seasons of the excavation were widely reported, making Alcock into one of the better known British archaeologists of the time. His methodology made headlines within the archaeological community with his use of geophysical survey, which in those pre-Time Team days was an unusual and experimental process, while he also preferred the use of open-area excavation to the Wheeler method that held sway at the time. This methodology was to become the standard technique for British archaeology from the start of large scale rescue work in the 1970s, and shows that Alcock was at the cutting edge of archaeology.

Alcock’s sense of humour also came out during the excavations. He had a good understanding of what visitors to the site wanted to see, so he had a plastic skeleton excavated from the same spot every afternoon, with a bucket beside the trench to take donations for the diggers’ welfare fund. The money was used to the benefit of the local economy each evening in the pub.

The results of the excavation were impressive. The occupation of the hill had continued over a period of 1,200 years, going into the post-Roman period. Alcock was able to tell evocative stories of the history of the fort, and particularly of its fate during the Roman period, where there was clear evidence of a violent attack on the fort. However, the scale of the material recovered meant that his publication of the site (Alcock 1972) was really a large scale interim report. Final publication waited until 1995 for the Early Medieval material, which he published himself in 1995 (Alcock 1995), and 2000 for the earlier material (Barrett et al. 2000). The main drawback for Alcock was that he had now become irrevocably connected with Arthur in the minds of the public.