Chris is an archaeologist specialising in the prehistory of western Europe, with a particular interest in the archaeology of the Atlantic façade (Portugal, France, Britain & Ireland). He was an undergraduate and postgraduate at Cambridge, where his PhD was a study of landscape change and archaeological sites in western France. From 1990-2005 he was Assistant (later Deputy) Director of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge; then in January 2006 he became Professor of Prehistory at the Department of Archaeology at Durham. In addition, to his departmental teaching and admin he was editor of the journal Antiquity for five years from 2013. He retired in 2021 and is now Emeritus Professor, but is still as busy as ever, engaged in new projects of fieldwork and research. He is also (like many retired archaeologists!) writing up earlier projects for publication.
Chris has participated in fieldwork in Britain, France and Greece and has directed excavations at Neolithic settlement and burial sites in Portugal and western France. In 2001 he took time out from his European research to study the 17th century burial monuments to British traders at Surat in western India. More recently, he has excavated megalithic chambered tombs in Central Portugal, close to the Spanish frontier, and investigated buried prehistoric land surfaces associated with megalithic tombs on the tiny island of Herm in the Channel Islands. The excavations on Herm left a number of interesting questions and Chris returned there in June 2024 for a new phase of fieldwork.
Chris’s key research interests are the relationship of prehistoric monuments to their landscapes, including the way that megalithic blocks were selected and quarried. More recently, he has been involved in projects studying Neolithic mobility through stable isotopes, and kinship relationships within French collective graves using ancient DNA. A further major interest is the auditory and acoustic environment of prehistoric sites and monuments. This has included working with colleagues from Salford and Huddersfield in several Spanish painted caves. The idea was to determine whether the positioning of the art was influenced by the acoustics of the different spaces within the caves.
Chris has wide interests within archaeology and is editor of the textbook on world prehistory ‘The Human Past’, now in its 5th edition (2024). He has also written the textbook ‘Ancient Civilizations’ (revised 5th edition 2021) with US colleagues Brian Fagan and Charles Golden.
Thornborough Archaeology Group 