Eminent Harappa scholar Bridget Allchin passes away

Dr Bridget Allchin, the distinguished Harappa scholar who, along with her late husband, Dr Raymond Allchin, brought Pakistani and South Asian archaeology to the limelight, died in Cambridge on Tuesday last. She was 90.

She was the Joint Director of the British Archaeological Mission to Pakistan in the 1980s. Along with her husband and distinguished Pakistani scholars like Prof A.H. Dani and Prof F.A. Durrani, she produced definite evidence of the land of Pakistan, or the Indus Valley Civilisation, as possessing the oldest traces of human planned activity. Her landmark work “Earliest traces of man in the Potowar Plateau in Pakistan”, a British mission stretching from 1969 to 1983, opened up new fields of research in archaeology of the Indus Valley.

Her 1988 report on the “Pakistan Palaeolithic Project” is classified as a landmark in archaeological research.

Along with Prof A.H. Dani and Prof V.M. Masson, she traced from the earliest times the civilisation of the Indus Valley in a 1992 publication “Middle Palaeolithic Cultures: The Dawn of Civilisation”, a UNESCO publication. From her findings in the Potowar Plateau her research of late stone-age cultures helped her to produce another pioneering study “The Stone-tipped Arrow” in a rare ethno-archaeology study.

Her research on ‘Hunters and Pastoral Nomads’ is rated as being responsible for an interest in the origin of gypsies, which led to the conclusion, after extensive DNA studies, that they belonged to the nomads living still along the rivers of the Punjab and portions of Indian Rajasthan.

But her last enduring research was with the Pakistani archaeologists F.A. Durrani and M. Farid Khan on ‘The Site of Lewan’ in Bannu, which determined for the world of archaeology how mankind pecked and polished stone for weapons and utensils. It was an amazing study that stretched over two decades.

In a rare gesture to her genius, all Cambridge University college flags flew at half-mast on Thursday last. For the last 50 years she was a Wolfson College, Cambridge, Emeritus Fellow. In her will she left her entire wealth to the Alzheimer Research Trust UK. Her entire library has already been donated to the Ancient India and Iran Trust, which she set up with her eminent husband. — Majid Sheikh in Cambridge