Bridget Allchin

Bridget Allchin FSA (10 February 1927 – 27 June 2017) was an archaeologist who specialised in South Asian archaeology. She was born Bridget Gordon in Oxford but was raised on a farm in Galloway, Scotland. 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 African language. While there, she learnt to speak Sesotho and took up flying lessons.

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. Whilst studying, in 1950 Bridget met fellow PhD student Raymond Allchin and married in March 1951.  Travelling to India for the first time with Raymond in 1951, Bridget began to establish herself as a prominent South Asian Prehistorian in the UK and a pioneering female field-archaeologist in South Asia at a time when there were none. Her research interests and publications stretched 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).

Away from the field, Bridget held the role of founding Editor of the Journal of South Asian Studies for over a decade and was Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries (FSA) and a Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge. She was a founding trustee of the Ancient India and Iran Trust and was its Secretary and chairman, as well as founding member and Secretary General of the European Association of South Asian Archaeologists, editing a number of its proceedings. 

She died in Norwich on 27 June 2017 at the age of 90.