Leslie Alcock

Leslie Alcock (24 April 1925 – 6 June 2006) was Professor of Archaeology at the University of Glasgow, and one of the leading archaeologists of Early Medieval Britain.

His major excavations included Dinas Powys hill fort in Wales, Cadbury Castle in Somerset and a series of major hillforts in Scotland.

Alcock was born at Cheadle Hulme, Stockport, near Manchester, son of clerk Philip John Alcock and Mary Ethel (née Bagley).

He won a scholarship to Manchester Grammar School in 1935.

Alcock left school in 1942, subsequently joining the army and going on to serve as a captain in the Royal Gurkha Rifles during World War II.

After demobilisation 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 excavation at Cadbury Castle, South Cadbury, 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 excavations 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 at that time before its prominent use by archaeological television programme Time Team 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.

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 earliest identifiable occupation on the hill was Early and Late Neolithic.

After an apparent hiatus during the earlier Bronze Age it was reoccupied in the centuries around 1000BC, remaining so continuously until at least the first century AD. His excavations produced scant evidence for Roman occupation, aside from a barracks block of the latter first century but demonstrated that it was the largest reoccupied fortified hilltop in post-Roman Britain.

The publicity from the South Cadbury excavations meant that Alcock was one of Britain's best known archaeologists in the early 1970s.

However, the scale of the material recovered meant that his publication of the site (Alcock 1972) was really a large scale interim report.

This was reflected in 1973, when he was appointed to the newly established Chair of Archaeology at University of Glasgow.

This was an opportunity to re-focus his archaeological direction, and to build a new department.

The latter was achieved by the appointment of promising young talent alongside more established colleagues; these younger academics currently hold senior positions in British universities.

The former opportunity was realised by moving away from Arthur To look at the Dark Age sites of Scotland.

At this time, the Dark Ages were darker for Scotland than for England because of the paucity of written records for Scotland in the period and the lack of clearly Dark Age sites.

Some had been identified in earlier work, but virtually nothing was known about this important period of Scotland's past.

His changing focus can be seen with a review of Pictish settlements (Alcock 1980), but his manifesto for his new research trajectory came in a publication looking at hillforts across Britain (Alcock 1981), although he had been working on this trajectory from 1973 (Alcock & Alcock 1992, 216).

In this paper, Alcock listed the centres of political power named in the various annals relating to Scotland in this period; these annals were all from outwith Scotland and were mainly Irish.

Having named the important sites, he then set out to link the placename with a particular archaeological site.

In some cases, he was able to show a good degree of confidence in the identification; in others, he was less sure and later changed his mind, such as with Urquhart Castle, which he downgraded from Bridei mac Maelchon's fort to the fort of a Pictish noble mentioned in Adomnán's Life of Columba (Alcock & Alcock 1992, 242).

From 1994, until his death in 2006 Alcock was patron of the South Cadbury Environs Project, a programme of research exploring the landscape around the hillfort.

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.

He also identified Late Saxon refurbishment of the defences and a foundation trench for a probable cruciform church, apparently never completed but intended to meet the needs of moneyers moved to the hill for security during the early 11th century AD.

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.