Martin Harrison (archaeologist)
British archaeologist (1935-1992)
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 1960 and 1961 he was the Acting-Controller of Antiquities in Cyrenaica where he directed three excavations for the Department of Antiquities, at the House of the Orpheus Mosaic at Ptolemais, at the sixth century church at Ras el Hilal, and in the Greco-Roman Theatre at Apollonia.
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. Also in 1964 began excavating the church of St Polyeuctus at Saraçhane in Istanbul, for Dumbarton Oaks and the Istanbul Archaeological Museum. This was the first stratigraphic excavation of a major site in the centre of Istanbul. He was a joint director with the Turkish archaeologis Nezih Firath.
The public source identifies “Martin Harrison (archaeologist)” as british archaeologist (1935-1992). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Martin, Harrison and archaeologist.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3295450. VIAF identifies the subject as 27146824523307630073. The Library of Congress control number is n84203608. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1935, 1992, 1958 and 1959.
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This entry incorporates text from “Martin Harrison (archaeologist)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.