Professor Emeritus Geoffrey William Dimbleby, B.Sc., M.A., D.Phil., Hon.D.Sc.

Geoff Dimbleby was born in Newcastle upon Tyne on 27 May 1917 and went to Cheltenham Grammar School after his family moved to Stroud in the 1920s. There he went for long walks in the Cotswolds and developed the life-long interest in natural history which was to shape his career. He read botany at Magdalen College, Oxford, to which he won a scholarship, and on graduation in 1940 as both B.A. and B.Sc. joined the RAF, where most of his time was spent on aerial photographic interpretation. Towards the end of the war he was involved in the identification of V1 and V2 launch sites, was twice mentioned in despatches and demobilized with the rank of Squadron Leader. Dimbleby returned to Oxford in 1945 as Departmental Demonstrator and research worker in Forest Ecology and in 1947 was appointed lecturer in Forestry (Ecology), a post he held until 1964. His doctorate was awarded in 1950 for a thesis on The Ecology of Some British Podzol Formations. At Oxford during the immediate post-war period, Dimbleby was one of a small group engaged in research aimed at widening the scope of forestry studies from its narrow production base to include the interaction of trees, poor soil and heathland on each other. It was soil research on the North York moors which led Dimbleby into archaeology. Cutting a section through one prehistoric round barrow covered with infertile moorland soil he discovered that the land surface on which the barrow had been built was a more fertile soil. So began Dimbleby’s systematic analysis of pollen in soils. Archaeological deposits provided new insights into early environments and human impact on the landscape and in 1962 he published his most original and influential book, The Development of British Heathlands and their Soils.

This work led to the unique Experimental Earthworks Project, of which Dimbleby was chairman from its establishment in 1959 until 1972 and a committee member until 1978, planning long-term experiments on artificial earthworks at Overton Down and Wareham aimed at gathering data on the movement and degradation of materials within the mounds as an aid to interpreting past human impact on the landscape. In 1964 he was appointed to the newly named Chair of Human Environment at London University’s Institute of Archaeology where, following the pioneering work of Professor F E Zeuner, he widened the interests of the department, promoting cooperation between environmental scientists, archaeologists, geologists and ecologists. His influential publications, Plants and Archaeology (1967) and Ecology and Archaeology (1977) followed and he introduced both theoretical and practical courses into the syllabus of the newly introduced B.Sc. in Archaeology as well as organizing international research seminars with Peter Ucko of the UCL Department of Anthropology. In 1974 Dimbleby’s department played a key role in the establishment of The Journal of Archaeological Science, of which he was a founding editor. Similarly, he encouraged Don Brothwell, then a member of his staff, to found the Association for Environmental Archaeology and was joint editor of several of its early volumes. In 1977 Dimbleby was instrumental in setting up the Science-Based Archaeology Committee of the then Science Research Council and was also a member of the Committee for Rescue Archaeology of the Ancient Monuments Board. He chaired the Committee’s working party on The Scientific Treatment of Materials from Rescue Excavations, its report was endorsed by the Board and accepted by the Secretary of State for the Environment, resulting in the restructuring and rationalisation of the arrangements for the conservation of material from rescue excavations. Throughout his life Dimbleby was sustained by his strong Christian faith, which he not only affirmed but practised. He chaired Oxfam in Oxford and, when he went to live in St Albans, was a founder member and first chairman of the local World Poverty Action Group as well as chairman of the St Albans Council of Churches. When his wife fell ill with multiple sclerosis in the 1970s he became involved with fundraising for research into the disease and took up the cause of handicapped people generally. In the 1960s he chaired the first churches commission on the environment and thereafter attended World Council of Churches meetings of scientists and theologians. An elder of the United Reformed Church, he confronted the deep theological questions raised by his scientific scholarship and his final publication, Testing the Foundations (1997) is a thoughtful attempt to reconcile his faith with `the knowledge acquired as an environmental scientist’. Dimbleby died in St Albans on 8 April 2000.