Abstract
MR. STUART PIGGOTT, who has been appointed to the chair of prehistoric archæology in the University of Edujburgh in succession to Prof. V. Gordon Childe (see Nature, March 9, p. 293), is still appreciably under forty and is a notable instance of a man rising to academic eminence without having graduated at a university at the ordinary time of life. He is a native of Petersfield, Hants, where he studied the local archaeology keenly in boyhood; he then began his career as a museum assistant at the Reading Museum, where his work both in the museum and as a field student of the antiquities of the Berkshire Downs attracted the attention of archaeologists; and he was appointed to the staff of the Royal Commission on Ancient Monuments in Wales. He specialized in the Neolithic archaeology of Britain, and in 1932 published what became the standard monograph on British pottery, in collaboration with Prof. Gordon Childe. He next went to the Morven Institute of Archaeological Research operated by Mr. Alexander Keiller, with its headquarters at Avebury; in addition to valuable work with Mr. Keiller, he also published further researches of his own, notably on the Early Bronze Age of Wessex and its relations with Brittany and Europe generally and with Mycenean Greece, for he had by this time travelled in France, Greece and Scandinavia. After his marriage shortly before the War, he and his wife settled at Rockbourne near Salisbury and undertook excavations and surveys of the prehistoric antiquities of Cranborne Chase and other districts.
Article PDF
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Prehistoric Archæology at the University of Edinburgh: Mr. Stuart Piggott. Nature 158, 91 (1946). https://doi.org/10.1038/158091b0
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/158091b0