Martin Harrison

Richard Martin Harrison (16 May 1935 – 9 September 1992) was a British academic and archaeologist best known for his excavation of the church of St Polyeuctus at Saraçhane in Istanbul.

Born in Windsor, Harrison was educated at Sherborne School. He read Greats at Lincoln College Oxford and graduated with a BA in 1958. Between 1959 and 1963 he carried out a survey of churches in Lycia.

Between 1961 and 1962 he lectured at Bryn Mawr college in Pennsylvania. In 1964 he was appointed as a lecturer at Newcastle University in the department of classics and then became professor and head of department in the new department of archaeology. and a popular account A Temple for Byzantium was published in 1989.

Martin Harrison succeeded Sheppard Frere as Professor of the Archaeology of the Roman Empire at Oxford University in 1985. In 1991 he became a research professor at Oxford and a Fellow of All Souls college.

He began a survey of the site of Amorium in Phrygia in 1987 followed by five seasons of excavation, the fifth season was completed only weeks before his death.

Personal life He married Elizabeth Browne in 1959 shortly after graduating. They spent their honeymoon in a tent surveying churches in Lycia. They had one son and three daughters.

He suffered a stroke in 1985 only months after taking up the professorship of the Archaeology of the Roman Empire.

Selected bibliography