Peter Ucko made an important contribution to academic archaeology, notably through his work on Palaeolithic rock art. But he also had a genius for organisation, and – as director of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies from 1972 to 1980, and the founder of the World Archaeological Congress (WAC), among other roles – he is perhaps better known as one of its crusading politicians.

Peter John Ucko was born to refugees from central Europe in London in 1938. Having developed a fascination with Egyptology as a child, he completed a first degree in anthropology at University College London in 1959. He first made his name with innovative work integrating archaeology and anthropology in the study of material culture.

He moved to the Institute of Archaeology (at that time independent of UCL) to write a PhD on prehistoric human figurines from Western Asia and the Aegean, relying on comparative evidence from anthropology to dispute the common assumption that figurines were typically associated with fertility cults. He rejected piecemeal ethnographic parallels and instead sought to develop a systematic approach to correlations between social function and archaeological context.

On completing his PhD in 1962 Ucko returned to UCL to organise the teaching of material culture in the anthropology programme. He dismantled any tendency among his students to presume that the term “primitive” implied “inferior”, or that farmers inevitably followed hunters in a simple story of unilinear progress; and he set out a general programme for assessing evidence of diffusion or independent invention.

Ucko’s early academic publications broke new ground in the study of material culture – penis sheaths, funerary remains, rock art. His World University Library book on Palaeolithic rock art (1967, co-authored with Andrée Rosenfeld) drew on ethnographic evidence from Australia, inaugurating the contacts that led to his appointment as director of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies in Canberra in 1972.

The institute (which was to become the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies in 1989) had been established ten years before with a remit to salvage records of what were assumed to be disappearing Aboriginal cultures. Its brief explicitly excluded study of the contemporary condition of indigenous communities, for fear that these might jeopardise both the government funding on which the institute depended and anthropologists’ future fieldwork at a time when access to Aboriginal communities was tightly regulated by government or church agencies.

Ucko was committed to improving the quality of research at the institute, and soon organised a multi-disciplinary conference, but quickly came under attack from Aboriginal activists for not redirecting research towards contemporary, practical issues.

Ucko secured Aboriginal participation in the institute’s management. His own publications virtually ceased as he set up an ambitious programme to recruit and promote a generation of social scientists who would investigate and publicise the contemporary conditions of Aboriginal life. This would not have been possible without a change of government in Australia. Both the new Whitlam Government and the Liberal regime of Malcolm Fraser that succeeded it were committed to negotiating with Aboriginal communities, although Ucko’s provision of anthropologists to document Aboriginal land claims tested the limits of government tolerance. The institute’s new publications programme included a substantial number of Aboriginal authors.

On returning to the UK in 1981 to become head of the archaeology department at the University of Southampton, Ucko initiated a new research project in Mediterranean archaeology, but this became less important as he again became involved in the politics of archaeology. In 1982 Ucko became national secretary of the International Union of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences, and developed an innovative programme for the next five-yearly international conference.

He made arrangements to involve indigenous archaeologists from Africa, the Americas, Australia and Asia. Apartheid still ruled in South Africa, however, and the 1985 declaration of a state of emergency in the face of increasing black opposition led the United Nations to call for sanctions against South Africa. The University of Southampton students’ union and the city council challenged Ucko to preclude South African archaeologists from participating in the conference.

Invited participants from Sweden, Nigeria and India announced that they would withdraw if South Africans attended. It is no surprise, given his work in Australia, that Ucko agreed to a boycott. Disowned by the UISPP, he created a new organisation, the World Archaeological Congress. The conference took place, with more than 1,000 participants from almost 100 countries, and resulted in 22 books whose topics ranged from the academic to the polemical.

After shaky beginnings, the WAC has become a significant force in archaeology, transforming the discipline through its promotion of international collaboration and political awareness without sacrificing academic standards. Subsequent WAC congresses have taken place at five-year intervals in Venezuela, India, South Africa and the US. The One World Archaeology series inaugurated in Southampton now includes 50 volumes.

In 1996 Ucko left Southampton to return, as principal, to the Institute of Archaeology. He set about restructuring the institute’s teaching programme to realise the integrated archaeological/anthropological approach he had championed in his days as a junior lecturer at UCL.

Although standing back from the management of WAC he continued for some years as series editor of One World Archaeology, and co-edited the volume on The Archaeology and Anthropology of Landscape (1999). Retiring in 2005, he finally returned to research, publishing nine papers in 2006, including one on Sigmund Freud’s artefact collection.

In 1979 Ucko was awarded the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Rivers medal for his sustained contribution to anthropological research. In recognition of his work on Palaeolithic rock art he was made membre d’honneur of the Prehistoric Society of Ariège in 1985. In 2005 he delivered the RAI’s Huxley Memorial Lecture. He is survived by his partner, Jane Hubert.

Professor Peter Ucko, archaeologist, was born on July 27, 1938. He died of diabetic complications on June 14, 2007, aged 68