David Stronach was a Scottish archaeologist of ancient Iran and Iraq. He is an emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He is an expert on Pasargadae. Stronach was educated at Gordonstoun and Cambridge University. During the 1960s and 1970s he was Director of the British Institute of Persian Studies in Tehran. In the 1990s, he excavated several parts of Nineveh. His scholarship has earned him several honours and awards, including the invitation to deliver endowed lectures at Harvard and Columbia. He is also the recipient of the 2004 Archaeological Institute of America Gold Medal for "Distinguished Archaeological Achievement".
During his time in Iran, he met Ruth Vaadia (1937–2017), an Israeli archaeologist who was also working in Iran, and married her. They have two daughters, The family left Iran at the time of the 1979 Iranian Revolution He became a professor at Berkeley in 1981 and retired in 2004.
David Samuel Margoliouth was born in London in 1858. He was educated at Winchester and Oxford where he graduated with a Double First and a significant number of prizes. He was appointed to the Laudian Chair in Arabic, Oxford University, in 1889, a position he held until he retired, from ill health, in 1937. He wrote many works on the history of Islam and translated and edited Arabic poetry. He was the recipient of the Society's Triennial Gold Medal in 1928, and served on the Council and as Vice-President, President and Director of the Society.
Dr David Richardson was a surgeon in the Madras European Regiment who saw military action in the 1824-26 war in Burma when he escorted a group of wounded to safety. He was seconded as a political officer to the administration of the new British territory of Tenasserim Provinces where he rose to be a senior assistant to the Commissioner, E.A. Blundell, with responsibilities for justice, finance, health, education and civil affairs. Richardson was chosen for his "scientific acquirements" and "mild and conciliatory manner". He was an excellent linguist. Richardson undertook a mission to the King of Siam in Bangkok in 1839. The material within these Papers is mainly to do with this mission.
Richardson married a Tai-speaking woman and died, age 49, in Moulmein. He translated and annotated a comprehensive and influential Buddhist legal text, the dhamathat or the laws of Menoo, which was published in 1847.
David Pocock was born in London and studied under FR Leavis at Pembroke College, Cambridge. In the early 1950s he went to Oxford and under the supervision of Edward Evans-Pritchard, carried out field research among Asian migrants in east Africa and subsequent work in Gujarat which resulted in two monographs. His collaboration with Louis Dumont led to the founding, in 1957, of the journal Contributions to Indian Sociology, which they wrote jointly for five years.
He moved to the University of Sussex, Brighton, in 1966, becoming Professor of Social Anthropology, retiring in 1987.