Bridget Allchin

Bridget Allchin (born 1927, Oxford, England) is an archaeologist who specialises in South Asian archaeology. She has published many works, some co-authored with her late husband F. Raymond Allchin (1923–2010).

Like Raymond, Bridget's family also had a long heritage of medical practitioners, including Dr Thomas Monro, an ancestor who had attempted to treat the 'madness' of George III. Born in Oxford, Bridget was raised on a farm in Galloway in lowland Scotland, which she largely ran with her mother during the Second World War with the assistance of prisoners of war. Bridget started a degree in History and Ancient History at University College London but, at the end of her first year, left for South Africa when her parents decided to emigrate. Interested in the culture of neighbouring Basutoland, Bridget persuaded her parents to let her leave the farm and recommence her studies. Enrolling at the University of Cape Town she read African Studies, which included anthropology, archaeology and an African language. Taught by Professor Isaac Shapira and Dr A. J. H. Goodwin, Bridget developed a specialism in the South African Stone Age but decided to return to England and in 1950 she began a PhD at the Institute of Archaeology studying under Professor Frederick Zeuner to broaden her knowledge of the lithic industries of the Old World.

It was here in 1951 that Bridget met fellow PhD student Raymond Allchin and married in March of that year. Travelling to India for the first time with Raymond in 1951, Bridget steadily but firmly established herself as the most prominent South Asian Prehistorian in the UK. A pioneering female field-archaeologist in South Asia at a time when there were none, Bridget’s research interests and publications were to stretch across South Asia from Afghanistan to Sri Lanka. At first Bridget’s academic and organisational skills were dedicated to supporting Raymond’s fieldwork but, despite not holding a full-time academic post, she successfully raised funds and established a number of innovative field projects. This included directing fieldwork in the Great Thar Desert with Professor K. T. M. Hegde of the M.S. University of Baroda and Professor Andrew Goudie of the University of Oxford. Bridget subsequently developed links with the Pakistan Geological Survey and played a critical role in initiating collaborations which resulted in a survey of the Potwar Plateau directed by Professor Robin Dennell of the University of Sheffield and Professor Helen Rendell of the University of Sussex to search for Palaeolithic industries during the second phase of the British Archaeological Mission to Pakistan with the support of the Leverhulme Trust. An independent author and researcher in her own right, she published The Stone-Tipped Arrow: a Study of Late Stone Age Cultures of the Tropical Regions of the Old World (1966) and The Prehistory and Palaeography of the Great Indian Desert (with Andrew Goudie and K. T. M. Hegde: 1978) and Living Traditions: Studies in the Ethnoarchaeology of South Asia (1994).

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