Professor Frank Roy Hodson FBA (1950)

Roy was a distinguished prehistorian and a foundational pioneer of quantitative and computational archaeology.

 After an initial degree in Classical Archaeology at Queens’ Cambridge (1953), he studied for a diploma in Prehistoric Archaeology in the Faculty of Archaeology and Anthropology of Cambridge (1954). He then carried out research on “The Celto-Ligurians in Southern France” for his Ph.D. degree (1957).

In 1958, he was a site supervisor at Mortimer Wheeler’s Charsada excavations (Northwest Pakistan). From 1959 to 1993 he was first lecturer and then professor of European Prehistory at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London.

Between 1966 and 1968 he also held a Senior Research Fellowship at Churchill College Cambridge, attached to the Cambridge University Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics. In 1984 he was elected Fellow of the British Academy.

During his career he radically reshaped the theoretical and methodological landscape of European Iron Age studies. He dismantled impressionistic, “invasionist” explanations of prehistory, replacing them with data-driven typologies. His landmark 1968 study, The La Tène Cemetery at Münsingen-Rain, utilised early computer-driven cluster analysis and matrix ordering to establish definitive relative chronologies for the earlier Iron Age. This established new dimensions of material culture, integrating mathematical modelling, long before the ‘digital age’. 

Roy’s significant contribution to European chronologies was continued in his publication of the Late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age European ‘type site’: Hallstatt: The Ramsauer Graves: quantification and analysis (1990). His legacy to the wider discipline includes the seminal textbook Mathematics and Computers in Archaeology (1975), co-authored with computer scientist Jim Doran. This ground-breaking volume successfully bridged the gap between traditional archaeology and modern computer science.  

Roy was a precise, quietly revolutionary, scholar who brought archaeology firmly into the scientific age who was supervisor to key scholars as diverse as Prof Sir Paul Mellars and Prof. Sue Hamilton.

In his early years of retirement, he returned to Egypt on cultural tours, the country where he had undertaken National Service.

In his most recent years, he spent a tranquil life in his house and garden in the village Barrington near Cambridge, alongside his wife Pat, herself a distinguished veterinary scientist, who survives him.

Written by Sue Hamilton with additions from Simon Stoddart.