Professor Ian Ralston

Professor of Later European Prehistory School of History, Classics and Archaeology , College of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Edinburgh (since 1998).

Ian Ralston studied under Professor Stuart Piggott CBE, FBA at Edinburgh University and took part in fieldwork in Britain, training on excavations from Orkney in the North with Drs Graham and Anna Ritchie, through lowland Scotland and the north of England with Dr Brian Hope-Taylor, to the exploration of Silbury Hill, Wiltshire, led by Professor Richard Atkinson. In Britain, his own fieldwork has focussed on eastern Scotland north of the Tay, and has included work on a range of prehistoric and Early Historic sites, most recently Burghead in Moray.

He has also worked in Europe, especially in France, on the Iron Age. He has carried out projects in Berry, especially at Levroux (with Dr Olivier Buchsenschutz). His PhD research was undertaken in Limousin. From the mid 1980s for a decade he worked on the late President Mitterand’s Grand Projet at the oppidum of mont Beuvray in Burgundy, and then since the mid 1990s he has been undertaking collaborative fieldwork in and around the key mid-first-millennium BC centre at Bourges.

From 1974 until 1985 he was successively Research Fellow and then Lecturer in Geography/Archaeology at Aberdeen University, whereafter he joined Edinburgh University. His main research interests have lain in later prehistoric settlements but (though only for Scotland) he has worked on evidence from all periods from the first settlers until the Pictish period and beyond. He is a past President of the Council for Scottish Archaeology and was formerly Chairman of the Institute of Field Archaeologists.  In 2004, he was appointed by Mr Frank McAveety, MSP, then Minister of Culture, Scottish Executive, as Chair of the Treasure Trove Advisory Panel (now the Scottish Archaeological Finds Advisory Panel). He is presently Chairman of the Standing Committee for Archaeology. In 2006 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

He has also been involved in the development and practice of applied archaeology, especially in Britain and led Edinburgh University's Centre for Field Archaeology from 1990 until 2000. He maintains an active involvement in this sector through Edinburgh Research and Innovation, and is also non-executive Chairman of CFA Archaeology Ltd.

Ian Ralston has been a visiting professor at the Ecole normale superieure, Paris, and a visiting lecturer at Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest. In 2006 he was Brown Fellow and Visiting Professor of Anthropology at the University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee.