He and his wife immediately threw themselves into the building of the Glasgow department. The Church that played such a central role in the transformation of Roman Britain into Anglo-Saxon England remained strangely marginalised and it was not until 2003 with the publication of a lecture series given in Edinburgh, King's and Warriors, Craftsmen and Priests in Northern Britain, AD 550-850, that Alcock drew out more fully the role of the Church in shaping the period.Īlcock was appointed to the newly created chair in Archaeology at Glasgow University in 1973.

The image evoked was dominated by the political, military and social themes of the period. Sponsored by The Observer and guided by a research committee on which Wheeler among others served, the site provided a wealth of evidence for eight centuries of Iron Age occupation, a Roman military attack and garrisoning of the hill, and a re-modelling of the Iron Age rampart, a rebuilding of one of the gateways, and the construction of a possible timber hall in the post-Roman period. The lure of the Arthurian association was enough to ensure funding and publicity for what became the major excavation in a British Iron Age hillfort in the late 1960s. Two strands of evidence, the finding of pottery dating to the post-Roman period from the hillfort and the near contemporary accounts of a major British victory over the Saxons, possibly under the leadership of Arthur and possibly in the south-west of Britain, allowed Alcock to argue that such a military campaign required a major British army to have been encamped in a substantially defended structure: the re-defended hillfort of Cadbury would have been a suitable candidate. If King Arthur did ever exist then a great deal of our knowledge of him, as a British war leader confronting the Saxon advance among the ruins of the Roman Empire and not as the fabulous king of medieval legend, is due to the work of Leslie Alcock.

Leslie Alcock, archaeologist: born Carlisle 24 April 1925 Superintendent of Exploration, Department of Archaeology, Government of Pakistan 1950 Curator, Abbey House Museum, Leeds 1952 Assistant Lecturer, then Lecturer, then Reader, University College Cardiff 1953-73, Professor of Archaeology 1973 Professor of Archaeology, Glasgow University 1973-90 (Emeritus) President, Cambrian Archaeological Society 1982 President, Glasgow Archaeological Society 1984-85 President, Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 1984- married 1950 Elizabeth Blair (one son, one daughter) died Stevenage, Hertfordshire 6 June 2006.

Arthur's Britain by Leslie Alcock