Peacock worked on the site of Carthage, alongside Michael Fulford, in the 1970s, where he developed techniques of studying pottery which became widely adopted in other Mediterranean excavations.

[6] Peacock subsequently studied at the University of St Andrews in Scotland,[7] from which he received a BSc and,[2] in 1965, a PhD in geology.

Between 1987 and 1993, he directed the survey of Mons Claudianus, a Roman quarry in the Eastern Desert, as part of a project led by Jean Bingen.

[7] In 1993, he demonstrated through the use of satellite imagery that the Roman Red Sea port of Myos Hormos was located at Quseir al Qadim,[12] and excavated there alongside Lucy Blue and Stephanie Moser between 1999 and 2003.

His work demonstrated that a series of bricks found at the Late Roman fort of Pevensey, then believed to be the only material evidence of the activity of the general Stilicho in Britain, were nineteenth-century forgeries, probably created by Charles Dawson.

[16] Roberta Tomber, who was one of two students to complete Peacock's MSc course titled the "Scientific Analysis of Artefacts",[15] credited two of his articles from this period with "radically chang[ing] British prehistory, [by] illustrating the movement of pottery beyond local regions".

[21] Reviewing the book, Richard Reece called it "just the shot in the arm that pottery studies needed", though criticised aspects of its methodology.

[22] Paul Nicholson and Helen Patterson further criticised what they saw as Peacock's failure to set forth how his proposed types of sites would be manifested and distinguishable in the archaeological record.

[7] The techniques that Peacock and Fulford applied to the analysis of pottery finds at Carthage became standard practice in Mediterranean excavations.

[19] Keay credited Peacock's work in Egypt with helping to illuminate the trading relationship between the Roman Empire and India.

Later in his career, Peacock began to focus on research into millstones,[26] a field on which he had previously published a 1980 article using petrography to trace the provenances of various examples from the Roman Empire.