Leslie Alcock

Leslie Alcock FRSE (24 April 1925 – 6 June 2006) was Professor of Archaeology at the University of Glasgow, and one of the leading archaeologists of Early Mediaeval 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 in Manchester. His intellectual prowess was demonstrated early, when he won a scholarship to Manchester Grammar School in 1935. Details of Alcock's military career are sketchy. His obituaries, which are uniformly hagiographical in tone and simply repeat the information given in Alcock's entry in Who's Who, state that Alcock left school and joined the army in 1942 to fight in the Second World War as a captain in the Gurkhas. This seems unlikely, as he would have been only 16 or 17 years old at the time. In fact, he did not join the 7th Gurkha Rifles, as an Emergency Commissioned Officer, until 1944. It is unclear how he spent the years 1942-4, although officer training may account for some of this period. There is no record that he ever saw active service. These inconsistencies cast doubt on other aspects of traditional accounts of Alcock's time in India. Although it is widely claimed that he was fluent in Urdu and Punjabi, there is no evidence to corroborate this. What seems more clear is that Alcock developed an interest in archaeology during his posting to the Indian sub-continent. 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.

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