21 Facts About Raymond Allchin

Frank Raymond Allchin, FBA was a British archaeologist and Indologist.

Raymond Allchin was born in Harrow, London on 9 July 1923, son of Frank Macdonald Allchin, a doctor, and Louise Maude.

Raymond Allchin's brother was Donald Allchin, an Anglican priest and theologian.

Raymond Allchin was educated at Westminster and enrolled at the Regent Street Polytechnic, where he studied architecture for three years followed by conscription into the Royal Corps of Signals.

On completing his PhD, Raymond Allchin was appointed Lecturer in Indian archaeology at SOAS in 1954.

Raymond Allchin left SOAS in 1959 for the post of Lectureship in Indian Studies at Cambridge.

Raymond Allchin was an active field archaeologist throughout his career and his first introduction to South Asian fieldwork was in the Bamiyan Valley of Afghanistan in 1951.

Raymond Allchin's selected research topic, the Neolithic of Peninsular India, was one of the areas of South Asian archaeology most poorly understood and was a neglected area of research when compared to the Bronze Age Indus cities or those of the Early Historic period in the north of the Subcontinent.

Raymond Allchin again dated this site-type to the Neolithic of South India and to the fourth millennium BC on account of the associated polished stone axes.

Raymond Allchin interpreted the stockades at Utnur 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.

Raymond Allchin later developed these ideas into a narrative which bound together Hindu ritual tradition and contemporary pastoral practice with the archaeological findings, suggesting that the regular burning of the stockades was not a calamity or the result of raiding but part of an annual fire rite, perhaps surviving today as Holi, Divali or Pongal.

On moving to Cambridge in 1959, Raymond Allchin turned his attention to Pakistan and worked at the site of Shaikhan Dheri between 1963 and 1964.

Raymond Allchin suggested that a number of small iron plates pierced with small holes around their edges, some of which had rusted together, formed part of the scale armour from the cap of a cataphract, based on observations from Gandharan sculpture, excavation reports, textual sources and contemporary examples from Rajput.

Raymond Allchin suggested that a number of globular vessels, that Sir John Marshall had interpreted for distillation of water at Sirkap, Taxila, were actually alcohol stills.

Raymond Allchin recognised that these sherds belonged to the category of Burnished Red Ware associated with the Gandhara grave culture, dating to the beginning of the first millennium BC at the end of the Chalcolithic period.

In 1989 and at the age of 67, Raymond Allchin initiated his last major field project in Sri Lanka at the Citadel of Anuradhapura in the island's North Central Province following a joint invitation from Dr Roland Silva, director general of archaeology, and Dr Siran Deraniyagala, one of his former students and then archaeological advisor to the Government of Sri Lanka.

Raymond Allchin invited his former undergraduate and new research student, Robin Coningham, to accept the role of field director, and the results from excavations between 1989 and 1993, refuted many long held assumptions.

In December 2013, the first Annual Raymond Allchin Symposium, named in their honour, was held at the Trust.

Amongst other collections, the Ancient India and Iran Trust houses the Allchin archive, comprising the photographic slide collection of both Allchins and the meticulous work diaries which Raymond kept during each of his field seasons, offering great potential to scholars of South Asian archaeology.

Raymond Allchin served on the Governing Council of the Society for Afghan Studies and its successor, the Society for South Asian Studies, as well as being associated with the Charles Wallace Pakistan Trust, the British Academy's Stein-Arnold Committee and the Advisory Council of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Raymond Allchin was appointed a Fellow of the British Academy in 1981 and retired with the title of Emeritus Reader in South Asian archaeology in 1989.