Although many people would associate Rachel MacLean with African and Arabian Gulf archaeology, her early career was in Northern Irish and Cornish archaeology, working for the Department of the Environment in Ulster, and completing research for her BA dissertation on the enigmatic Fogou, Iron Age subterranean structures of west Cornwall. This is a brilliant piece of work, subsequently published in Cornish Archaeology, and for which Rachel got a First Class degree in the Department of Archaeology at Queen’s University, Belfast.
African archaeological opportunities arrived via a British Institute in Eastern Africa Graduate Studentship in 1991, and allowed Rachel to re-engage with the continent, her love for which was first nurtured in the late 1980s in Morocco and Zimbabwe, trekking, often alone, in the Atlas and Chimanimani Mountains. During the studentship, she participated in excavations at Soba, the former capital of the Christian kingdom of Alwa on the Blue Nile in Sudan, and developed the idea for her subsequent PhD research, in western Uganda on the Late Stone Age to Iron Age transition, and completed under the supervision of Ian Hodder at the Department of Archaeology in Cambridge in 1996.
Rachel MacLean and her husband Timothy Insoll drawing the plan of a unit at the archaeological site of Harlaa, an Islamic settlement in eastern Ethiopia in 2020.
Since then, Rachel has continued to pack an immense amount of work, alongside juggling the demands of family life. Following a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellowship centered on Zanzibar, she has been co-director of two large-scale projects with her husband, Timothy Insoll. One in northern Ghana, examining the archaeology of shrines, involved two months fieldwork a year between 2004 and 2009, and led to an important monograph she co-authored. The other has been of much longer duration, starting in Bahrain with a year’s residence in 2001, excavations and surveys have continued annually ever since. This has resulted in numerous publications, including her exceptionally popular co-authored, Archaeological Guide to Bahrain (2011), which is now being revised and translated into Arabic.
Rachel MacLean drawing the plan for a very deep unit in Manama, Bahrain, in 2018.
Rachel continues to be actively involved in field research, and besides Bahrain, is back in East Africa, participating in excavations in eastern Ethiopia every year since 2015. She has been an inspiration to many students with her energy, fortitude, patience, and exceptional fieldwork skills. A true TrowelBlazer.
From left: Rachel MacLean at Laga Oda, a rock shelter in Ethiopia in 2020, with Endris Hussien Siraj, an MA Archaeology student at Addis Ababu University (AAU), and Temesgen Leta, Antiquity Officer at the ARCCH and MA Archaeology student at AAU.
Written by Hannah Parsons-Morgan @Beathas_Ailsa
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