My Research

My curiosity is driven by a desire to grasp the diversity of human experiences across time and space; how different societies, from our earliest ancestors to today, show us what it means to be human, through the way they lived and the way they treated their dead. I am very interested in how humans live, cooperate, compete, and adapt — the capacity to cope with uncertainty and changing conditions in our social and ecological environments. My doctoral thesis at the University of Oxford used satellite imagery and spatial data to analyse how societies at the southern edge of the Sahara adapted their livelihoods to changing climatic conditions, until desert expansion forced them to migrate elsewhere. Most of my publications are freely available open-access.

In collaboration with other leading scholars, I have also investigated how seasonality influenced human behaviour at the dawn of technology (Dr James Clark — PhD, Cambridge); how societies in different polar environments have developed similar solutions to similar problems or how to monitor heritage at risk (Dr Jonathan Lim — PhD, Oxford); and how to apply forensic and computational methods to animal bones and determine if humans or carnivores ate them (Prof Jose Yravedra, Complutense).

Over the past decade, I have excavated a number of archaeological sites from across the world: caves in southern Spain, where Neanderthals and even earlier human ancestors lived; Taforalt (Morocco), a cave with the oldest cemetery in Africa, where I met my wife Jeannette; and the arid landscapes of Turkana, Kenya, where more clues on the origins of our own species still await discovery. I have recovered plant seeds that tell us about the palatial economy of Bronze Age Knossos (Crete), and learned about the changes in British society and culture at the end of the Roman period.