Irwin Scollar was born in 1928 in New York City. He completed his BSc degree in Electrical Engineering at the Lehigh University in 1948 and graduated from Columbia University in 1951, where he studied Classical Archaeology. In 1959 he received his PhD in Prehistoric Archaeology at Edinburgh University, UK. He moved to Germany in 1959 to work at the Rheinisches Landesmuseum in Bonn. He retired in 1991. Important milestones of his professional career in Archaeological Prospection were the introduction of systematic aerial photography from 1959, the systematic research and appliance of geophysical prospecting from 1960 and the computer evaluation of archaeological sites in Germany from 1961. One of his great achievements was the design and installation of the first large-scale system for computer image processing in archaeology in 1975. The volume «Archaeological Prospection» published by Scollar et al. (1990) is still a standard, summarizing his important contributions to this field of research. In addition to his work at the Rheinisches Landesmuseum, he received a lectureship at Bonn University between 1961 and 1966. From 1970 to 1974 he was consultant to the Gesellschaft für Mathematik und Datenverarbeitung for image processing methods. In 1980 he held a lectureship at the University of Cologne in computer methods for archaeology and in 1989 he received an honorary professorship at Cologne. He died on 13th December 2021.
More details and a list of references at ResearchGate and Academia.edu.