Producing a large body of scholarship ranging from archaeological excavations, ethnoarchaeology as well as epigraphy and linguistics, the Allchins made their work and that of others accessible through a series of sole, joint and edited publications.

Raymond was educated at Westminster and enrolled at the Regent Street Polytechnic, where he studied architecture for three years followed by conscription into the Royal Corps of Signals.

On his return, he embarked on a BA in Hindi and Sanskrit at SOAS University of London, followed by a PhD on the prehistory of Raichur District in Hyderabad under the supervision of Professor K. de B. Codrington at the same institution.

Excavating in 1952, and again in 1957, with the assistance of the Andhra Pradesh Department of Archeology and Museums, Raymond demonstrated that the ash mound had a distinct Neolithic sequence with later evidence of Iron Age occupation above.

In a single season, he cut through metres of cinder and ash and discovered that the mounds were contained by series of post-holes, demarking superimposed circular stockades.

He interpreted the stockades at Utnur as annual cattle camps, whose accumulations of dung were burnt at the end of each grazing season, thus creating a regular sequence of ash and cinder.

[7] He later developed these ideas into a narrative which bound together Hindu ritual tradition and contemporary pastoral practice with the archaeological findings, suggesting that the regular burning of the stockades was not a calamity or the result of raiding but part of an annual fire rite, perhaps surviving today as Holi, Divali or Pongal.

[13] Later as Joint Director of the British Archaeological Mission to Pakistan with Bridget, the focus shifted away from the Bronze Age to the Early historic period and particularly onto the site of Taxila.

On a walk around the Hathial ridge one February morning in 1980, not far from the Taxila Museum guesthouse, they discovered numerous sherds of a distinctive, highly burnished red ware covering an area of 13 hectares along the foot of the spur.

Raymond recognised that these sherds belonged to the category of Burnished Red Ware associated with the Gandhara grave culture, dating to the beginning of the first millennium BC at the end of the Chalcolithic period.

Also aware of the parallel presence of such sherds in the basal levels of Wheeler's excavations at the Bala Hisar of Charsadda challenged received wisdom at the time that suggested that such cities had been founded no earlier than the sixth century BC as the Persian Empire expanded eastwards and annexed the satrapy of Gandhara, and that the urban sequences of the region stretched back before Persian contact, possibly back to the late Chalcolithic.

Raymond invited his former undergraduate and new research student, Robin Coningham, to accept the role of field director,[16] and the results from excavations between 1989 and 1993, refuted many long held assumptions.

The Trust aimed to support and provide a focal point where scholars and members of the public with interests in the cultures of these geographic regions could meet and use its unique library, substantially composed of the collections of its founders.

[22] As well as undertaking almost forty years of field investigations, Raymond was also motivated by the need to record and protect heritage in the face of the pressures of increasing population and development in South Asia.

[25] Recognition of Raymond's contribution to South Asian archaeology was rewarded in Cambridge when he was appointed a Fellow of Churchill College in 1963 and promoted to a Readership in Indian Studies in 1972.

Like Raymond, Bridget's family also had a long heritage of medical practitioners, including Dr Thomas Monro, an ancestor who had attempted to treat the 'madness' of George III.