| Description | The papers and correspondence of John Allen, a geologist specialising in sedimentation and geoarchaeology. The collection comprises material covering the entire span of Allen's career, including early files concerning his field research in the Niger Delta in the 1950s which was Allen's first and only major overseas fieldwork. Much of the material from the 1980s relates to Allen's studies of the Severn Estuary. The research files include extensive photographic material, mostly aerial photography of research sites in the UK, especially Wales and the Welsh borders including Herefordshire and Monmouthsire, Pembrokeshire, Anglesey, Wells and Norfolk. There are also records of Allen's geoarchaeological work on churches, church yards and urban landscape in the latter part of his career, including Hampshire churches and Reading curbsides.
The collection includes numerous experiment and field notebooks, containing large data sets and experimental results as well as working notes on Allen's research and theories. Teaching materials comprising lecture notes and 35mm slides for presentations are also present, as well as draft materials for publicationsm, including journal papers and Allen's monograph 'Current ripples: their relation to patterns of water and sediment motion' published in 1968. There is some oversize material present, largely charts and maps. |
| AdminHistory | John Robert Lawrence Allen was a leading British geologist. He received his BSc in geology from the University of Sheffield in 1955, and began his postdoctoral research there but never submitted his thesis. In 1958 the University of Reading offered him a fellowship to research the delta of the River Niger, which he accepted, and in 1961 he became lecturer in geology at the University.
He remained at Reading for his entire career, even after the closure of the University's geology department in 1988. Towards the end of his career, his extensive research of the Severn estuary led him to shift his research focus towards geoarchaeology. |