Supervision and prospective students

I welcome enquiries from students interested in Palaeolithic archaeology and lithic technology, at undergraduate and graduate level alike. If your interests overlap with the themes below — or sit somewhere adjacent that you think could work — please get in touch.

Topics I would like to supervise

• Technological and behavioural variability in the Late Pleistocene — the Initial Upper Palaeolithic, Ahmarian, Aurignacian, and Gravettian in southern Europe and the Levant, and the Middle and Later Stone Age in southern Africa
• Cultural transmission, mobility, and human–climate interaction — what actually drives behavioural change: population movement and contact, environmental forcing, or innovation within local groups, and how we might tell these apart in the archaeological record
• Quantitative and computational lithic analysis — attribute analysis, multivariate statistics, and reproducible workflows in R
• 3D scanning and geometric morphometrics — artefact digitisation protocols, shape analysis, and 3D-based approaches to reduction sequences
• Experimental archaeology — knapping experiments designed to test archaeological hypotheses
• Open science in archaeology — open data repositories, code sharing, and reproducibility

Undergraduate and MA dissertations

Dissertation projects can draw on the Department’s experimental facilities and dedicated lithics laboratories, as well as on the open datasets and 3D models I have published through the Open Aurignacian Project and my datasets page. These are a good starting point for a project that draws on some of the most important Palaeolithic sites excavated across Italy and the Levant (Grotta della Cala, Grotta di Castelcivita, Grotta di Fumane, Ksar Akil, Riparo Bombrini).

PhD applicants

I am currently able to consider new doctoral students.

Doctoral research is hosted by the Department of Archaeology, one of the largest archaeology research programmes in the UK, with purpose-built laboratories for lithic analysis and Palaeolithic archaeology. Within the department I am a member of the Centre for the Archaeology of Human Origins (CAHO), which brings together researchers working on human origins and makes co-supervision across complementary specialisms straightforward.

There are two routes in: propose your own project, or apply to an advertised studentship. Funded studentships run in partnership with the South, West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership. Departmental scholarships are usually advertised in November or December, with deadlines the following February or March. PhDs start in September, and applications for September entry close on 1 July.

Full details on entry requirements, fees, and how to apply are on the Archaeology postgraduate research pages. Please get in touch well ahead of these deadlines — competitive applications take months, not weeks, and I would rather develop a proposal with you than receive a finished one.

Early-career researchers

Drawing on my own experience as a Global Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow, I am happy to mentor postdoctoral candidates preparing applications for Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions and comparable fellowship schemes, including hosting arrangements at the University of Southampton.

Getting in touch

Send me an email with:

• a short outline of your idea — half a page is plenty
• your CV
• your current stage of study and intended start date

I read everything, and I will tell you honestly if I am not the right supervisor for a project.