Frank Raymond Allchin, FBA (9 July 1923 – 4 June 2010) was a British archaeologist and Indologist. He and his wife, Bridget Allchin, formed one of the most influential British partnerships in the post-Independence study of South Asian archaeology. Producing a large body of scholarship ranging from archaeological excavations, ethnoarchaeology as well as epigraphy and linguistics, the Allchins made their work and that of others accessible through a series of sole, joint and edited publications. Seminal works include The Birth of Indian Civilisation (1968), which was later superseded by their books The Rise of Indian Civilisation in India and Pakistan (1982) and The Archaeology of Early Historic South Asia (1995).
Background
Raymond Allchin was born in Harrow, London on 9 July 1923, son of Frank Macdonald Allchin, a doctor, and Louise Maude. His brother was Donald Allchin, an Anglican priest and theologian. Raymond 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. Trained as a Line Mechanic, Raymond was posted to India in 1944. On his return, he embarked on a BA in Hindi and Sanskrit at SOAS University of London, followed by a PhD on the prehistory of Raichur District in Hyderabad under the supervision of Professor K. de B. Codrington at the same institution. On completing his PhD, Raymond was appointed Lecturer in Indian archaeology at SOAS in 1954. He left SOAS in 1959 for the post of Lectureship in Indian Studies at Cambridge.
Raymond died in Cambridge on 4 June 2010. He had a wife, Bridget and two children, Sushila and William.
Career
Afghanistan and South India
Raymond 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. Here, under the direction of Codrington, he studied the standing remains of Shahr-e-Zohak. Later that year, in the company of Bridget, he began his PhD research in Raichur District. Raymond'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. After undertaking a survey of sites within the District, he selected the ash-mound of Piklihal for further investigation. Excavating in 1952, and again in 1957, with the assistance of the Andhra Pradesh Department of Archeology and Museums, Raymond demonstrated that the ash mound had a distinct Neolithic sequence with later evidence of Iron Age occupation above.
In order to test some of his earlier theories about Piklihal, Raymond selected Utnur for excavation, one of the best-preserved ash mounds. In a single season, he cut through metres of cinder and ash and discovered that the mounds were contained by series of post-holes, demarking superimposed circular stockades. He 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. He 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. He 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.