THE archaeologist Ian Goodall was a pioneering expert on the iron artefacts of the Middle Ages, and a notable scholar of the English country house.

Ian Howard Goodall was born in York in 1948. While at Nunthorpe Grammar School he developed an interest in 18th-century buildings and culture. In 1966 he went to University College Cardiff to study archaeology, and stayed on there to take his doctorate in British medieval ironwork. His thesis was a pioneering study of a subject which had received little previous attention.

Throughout his life he maintained a steady flow of reports on ferrous objects found on excavations throughout Britain. They included contributions to Professor Martin Biddle’s 1990 publication on the finds from medieval Winchester and a long-standing commitment to the excavations at the settlement of Wharram Percy on the Yorkshire Wolds. In 1982 Goodall was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.

He had returned to York in 1972 to join the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England as an archaeological investigator. He transferred to its architectural division three years later.

This move occurred towards the end of the commission’s programme of research into the buildings of York, and he contributed a notable section on the development of staircases to the commission’s final inventory volume.

When the commission abandoned its inventories in favour of thematic volumes, Goodall became part of a team working on the houses of the North York Moors.

Over the next 20 years he was engaged in two further important surveys: a study (with Colum Giles) of West Yorkshire textile mills, much threatened by the 1980s collapse of their industry; and a national survey of the development of hospitals. This aimed to inform decisions about the future of Victorian and early-20th-century buildings as they became inappropriate for modern healthcare.

After serving as head of the royal commission’s York office during the early 1990s, and from 1995 to 2002, as head of the northern emergency recording team, he chose to return to research. He published papers on Sizergh Castle and Storrs Hall and at the time of his death was engaged in projects on Lake District villas and the remains of the Cumbrian gunpowder industry.

In 1975 he married Alison Evans. As an expert on non- ferrous metal artefacts, she worked with him on many reports. She and their son survive him.

Ian Goodall, archaeologist and architectural historian, was born on January 23, 1948. He died on August 16, 2006, aged 58.