Alison Venetia Graham Betts FSA FAHA is a Scottish archaeologist and academic, who specialises in the "archaeology of the lands along the Silk Roads" and the nomadic peoples of the Near East.
[3] She is the daughter of Ursula Graham Bower, an anthropologist, and Frederick Nicholson Betts, an army officer and ornithologist, and has a sister, Catriona.
[4] Her doctoral thesis was submitted in 1986 and was titled "The prehistory of the basalt desert, Transjordan: an analysis".
[5] In 1986, Betts joined the University of Edinburgh as a British Academy teaching fellow.
[4][1] In August 2016, Betts gave that year's Petrie Oration on "Kingship and the Gods in Ancient Khorezm: new light on the early history of Zoroastrianism";[6] the Petrie Oration is an "annual public lecture sponsored by the Australian Institute of Archaeology on ancient world archaeology".