John Evans was one of Britain’s leading prehistorians and the scholar who first made sense of prehistoric Malta and its megalithic temples. He was for many years the director of the Institute of Archaeology, now part of University College London, and had a key role in developing its central position as a place of teaching and research.
John Davies Evans was born in 1925 in Liverpool of Welsh parents. He was the first in his family to go on to university, winning an open scholarship to Pembroke College, Cambridge, at 17. After a first year reading English he began his war service, working at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, on the task of breaking each day’s new Enigma code as it was changed by the German Army