David Peacock (archaeologist)

David Philip Spencer Peacock (14 January 1939 – 15 March 2015) was a British archaeologist. Educated at Stamford School and at the University of St Andrews, he spent most of his career at the University of Southampton, where he specialised in the scientific study of Roman pottery.

Peacock worked on the site of Carthage, alongside Michael Fulford, in the 1970s, where he developed techniques of studying pottery which became widely adopted in other Mediterranean excavations. Towards the end of the decade, he carried out ethnographic survey work on North African potteries, which formed the basis of an influential typology of ceramic production sites, and established principles of categorising ceramics that were widely adopted in British archaeology. From the late 1980s, he worked on Roman Egypt, directing a survey of the quarry at Mons Claudianus and co-directing the survey and excavation of Mons Porphyrites. He also proved the location of the Roman Red Sea port of Myos Hormos and mapped the ports of Adulis and Gabeza.

Peacock has been credited with establishing the discipline of ceramic petrography in Britain. He was awarded the Kenyon Medal for classical studies by the British Academy in 2011. An obituary in Times Higher Education called him "one of the most innovative archaeologists of his generation".

Biography
David Philip Spencer Peacock was born on 14 January 1939. He was educated at Stamford School, an all-boys independent school in Lincolnshire. While there, he took part in archaeological fieldwork at the encouragement of the medievalist John Hurst. He attended excavations at Snail Down, near Everleigh, during his time at the school, and also took part in the excavation of a medieval kiln that had produced Stamford ware pottery, which was discovered in 1963 after ceramic sherds were found on the school's playing fields.

Peacock subsequently studied at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, from which he received a BSc and, in 1965, a PhD in geology. He then moved to the University of Birmingham, where he held, from 1965 until 1968, a research fellowship titled "The Application of Science to Archaeology". Thereafter, he moved to the University of Southampton, where he spent the remainder of his career: he was promoted to professor in 1990. He served two terms, 1998–2001 and 2001–2003, as Head of Archaeology at Southampton.

In the 1970s, Peacock worked on the British-led UNESCO excavations at the North African site of Carthage, which began in 1974 under the direction of Henry Hurst. Alongside his doctoral student Michael Fulford, he worked on the site's Roman-period pottery. In the late 1970s, he established the Ceramics Research Unit at Southampton, funded by English Heritage. With David F. Williams, he worked on promoting the reporting of finds of Roman amphorae from excavations in Britain, and on identifying the types of stone, including marble, used on Roman sites. In the late 1980s, he carried out the first large-scale survey of Roman pottery-production sites in the central and Sahel regions of Tunisia.

From the later 1980s, Peacock worked largely on Roman Egypt. Between 1987 and 1993, he directed the survey of Mons Claudianus, a Roman quarry in the Eastern Desert, as part of a project led by Jean Bingen. From 1994 until 1998, he co-directed the survey and excavation of Mons Porphyrites, in the Red Sea Hills, with Valerie Maxfield. In 1993, he demonstrated through the use of satellite imagery that the Roman Red Sea port of Myos Hormos was located at Quseir al Qadim, and excavated there alongside Lucy Blue and Stephanie Moser between 1999 and 2003. Between 2004 and 2005, Peacock and Blue mapped the Red Sea ports of Adulis and Gabeza in Eritrea.

Peacock established the Highfield Press publishing company, which he handed over to his son Andrew to manage. He was married to Barbara. David Peacock retired in 2004, and died on 15 March 2015. An obituary in Times Higher Education called him "one of the most innovative archaeologists of his generation".

Academic work
Between 1967 and 1970, Peacock focused his work on ceramic petrography (the mineralogical study of ancient pottery). He made use of techniques normally used in geology, such as the microscopic analysis of thin sections of pottery to identify their clay's place of origin. Roberta Tomber, who was one of two students to complete Peacock's MSc course titled the "Scientific Analysis of Artefacts", credited two of his articles from this period with "radically chang[ing] British prehistory, [by] illustrating the movement of pottery beyond local regions". In one of these papers, published in 1969, Peacock identified inclusions of gabbro in Neolithic coarseware pottery from around the south-west of England, which allowed him to trace its origin to a single source on the The Lizard in Cornwall, and so to demonstrate that the pottery had been transported over longer distances than previously thought. The archaeologist Patrick Quinn has credited Peacock with establishing the discipline of ceramic petrography in the United Kingdom.

Peacock's work advanced the study of Roman trade: in particular, he worked on the economic role of transport amphorae, the connections between Rome and India, and the economy of the city of Carthage. According to a 2015 obituary in The Times, his writings on the circulation of Roman pottery remained standard works on the subject. In his 1977 paper "Ceramics in Roman and Medieval Archaeology", he established principles and guidelines for characterising the fabric of ceramic finds that became standard in excavations of all periods in Britain, and became the basis of the National Roman Fabric Reference Collection.

Peacock's 1982 work Pottery in the Roman World: An Ethnoarchaeological Approach applied his study of contemporary traditional potteries to those in earlier periods, and set forth a typology of ceramic production sites described as "classic" by the medieval archaeologist Chris Wickham in 2013. Reviewing the book, Richard Reece called it "just the shot in the arm that pottery studies needed", though criticised aspects of its methodology. Paul Nicholson and Helen Patterson further criticised what they saw as Peacock's failure to set forth how his proposed types of sites would be manifested and distinguishable in the archaeological record.

Prior to joining the excavations at Carthage, Peacock had worked on Dressel 1 amphorae from Britain, and he continued to work on these vessels at the site. The techniques that Peacock and Fulford applied to the analysis of pottery finds at Carthage became standard practice in Mediterranean excavations. These methods included using the fabric of potsherds to sort large ceramic assemblages, and the use of quantitative measurements such as the weighing of ceramic finds. They identified and named the Roman pottery style known as Pantellerian ware, after its origin on the island of Pantelleria: the use of thin-section analysis demonstrated that the pottery contained inclusions characteristic of the island's volcanic rock. The archaeologist Simon Keay described the two articles stemming from Peacock's survey work in Tunisia as "landmark".

Peacock also studied the trade in decorative stone throughout the Roman Empire, particularly that quarried in Egypt. Keay credited Peacock's work in Egypt with helping to illuminate the trading relationship between the Roman Empire and India. Later in his career, Peacock began to focus on research into millstones, a field on which he had previously published a 1980 article using petrography to trace the provenances of various examples from the Roman Empire. Keay described Peacock's 2013 monograph, The Stone of Life, as his magnum opus on the topic.

In 2011, Peacock was awarded the Kenyon Medal for classical studies by the British Academy; he received the Pommerance Award for scientific contributions to archaeology from the Archaeological Institute of America in 2012. A Festschrift in his honour was published posthumously in 2016. His doctoral students included the archaeologists Richard Hodges, Jane Timby and Ian Whitbread.