John Amyas Alexander (1922–2010): an appreciation

John Alexander will be greatly missed. He was a true gentleman and a scholar whose impact upon African archaeology in terms of his guidance for generations of students (myself included) has been immense. This is his fundamental legacy, from those he taught as undergraduates in Cambridge to his many PhD students, his extramural students and his African students in Sudan, a country with which he had a more than sixty year relationship, and at the Universities of Ghana (1967) and Ibadan, Nigeria (1971), where he also taught.

John was always generous with his time and would always answer letters and enquiries, even from undergraduates confused about what they wanted to do on finishing their first degree (as in my own case). If at all possible he would invariably prefer to meet students and colleagues in person, usually latterly in his wonderful room above the main gate in St John's College, Cambridge, stacked high with books, papers and ethnographic oddments. Here, in an atmosphere of pipe, cigarette and cigar smoke usually combined, and with strong coffee poured from an ancient brass pot, John would listen and impart his guidance. John was not one for feuds, quarrels, or gossip, and thus his opinions and guidance could be entirely trusted. Neither was he at all selfish, too often the vice of academics. Wahida and Wahida's (2004a, 10) description of his personality as combining “gentle and sedate manners with quiet authority” offers a perfect summary.

John's academic advice was invariably first rate. He was extremely erudite, read more widely than most and had eclectic interests, from an encyclopaedic knowledge of African archaeology through that of the Balkans and Iron Age Europe to the archaeology of his long-term home of Cambridge and its surrounding area. The Festschrift published as a special issue of Azania in 2004 attests to these interests, which were grouped under five thematic headings: historical archaeology; archaeology and ethnography; archaeology and the study of religion; culture contact, cultural exchange and culture change; and archaeology and publication (Smith et al. 2004, ix).

John was also a field archaeologist. Stacked outside his office were wooden soap crates of a type long since disappeared from the shelves of West African shops, their source, filled with sherds from Ghana and Sudan that bore testimony to his fieldwork. This was fieldwork that also encompassed the United Kingdom, four seasons at Qasr Ibrim in Egypt, the Netherlands and Yugoslavia (Wahida and Wahida 2004b).

John's publications were steadily produced over his career (Wahida and Wahida 2004b) and he was no doubt working on something new at the time of his death. In the African context it will be his writing on Sudan that will be best known, while among non-Africanists of my own generation it tends to be his Jugoslavia Before the Roman Conquest (1972), part of the monumental Ancient Peoples and Places series published by Thames and Hudson under the editorship of Glyn Daniel. Personally, John's most exciting and intellectually stimulating publication is a paper from 1979, “The archaeological recognition of religion: the examples of Islam in Africa and ‘Urnfields’ in Europe” published in a volume on Space, hierarchy and society edited by Burnham and Kingsbury (1979). Unfortunately little known, this was groundbreaking in recognising the overall absence of dedicated archaeological approaches to religion over a decade before the first usually recognised conference on the subject (Garwood et al. 1991).

Overall, perhaps John's greatest contribution to publication on African archaeology was his founding of the Cambridge Monographs in African Archaeology series published by British Archaeological Reports (Archaeopress). John did not just found the series, but continued to edit the volumes, along with Laurence Smith and latterly myself, until his death. This series, of which some 80 volumes have now been published, provides an unparalleled outlet for the publication of theses and primary empirical data in which few other publishers would be interested. It again reflects John's concern with younger scholars and has helped many now in academic and other professional positions by providing their first major publication. Its list of authors reads like a who's who of African archaeology, all of whom would have benefited from John's editorial expertise and guidance, and it forms another part of John's legacy for African archaeology.

There is much that cannot be said here and for a formal biography readers should consult John's Azania festschrift and especially the paper in it by Wahida and Wahida (2004a). John will be greatly missed and sadly his passing also represents a generation and a less selfish outlook that is now disappearing, for the lack of which African archaeology and academia in general will be much poorer.

Tim Insoll

School of Arts, Histories and Cultures, University of Manchester,

Manchester, M13 9PL, United Kingdom

Email: [email protected]