Dr Paul Pettitt
|
Paul Pettitt holding a Gravette Point, set of Channel Four’s Ice World, Castelmerle Valley, Dordogne, France.
|
Telephone:0114 22 22919
E-mail: P.Pettitt@sheffield.ac.uk
I am a Senior Lecturer in Palaeolithic Archaeology . My research concentrates on the European Middle and Upper Palaeolithic and the African Middle Stone Age. More specific research interests include lithic technology, Late Glacial demography, Upper Palaeolithic cave and portable art and the origins of burial and other mortuary activities. In addition I have interests in prehistoric chronometry, particularly radiocarbon dating.
My doctoral research concentrated on Middle Palaeolithic lithic technology from cave sites in southwest France, and what one might tell from them about how Neanderthals ere thinking. Following this I was from 1995 to 2002 Senior Archaeologist in the Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit at Oxford University, during which time I was Douglas Price Junior Research Fellow at Keble College (1996-9) and Research Fellow and Tutor in Archaeology and Anthropology at Keble College (1999-2003). I have worked on numerous occasions with television and radio, having appeared on Meet the Ancestors, Coast and Landscape Mysteries for the BBC. I have acted as a consultant for a number of BBC and independent television productions including Horizon, Walking with the Beasts, and Walking with the Cavemen, and was scientific consultant for Channel Four´s Neanderthal and subsequent Ice World.
|
Vindija Cave, Croatia. The level to which I’m pointing contained several Neanderthal fossils which are the youngest dated as yet.
|
Research supervision:
I supervise PhD research into various aspects of Middle and Upper Palaeolithic archaeology. I am keen to attract in particular research into Neanderthal behaviour, Upper Palaeolithic lithics, burials and art, and the African Middle Stone Age. In addition, I co-supervise with Dr Caitlin Buck (Department of Probability & Statistics) research into chronometry in prehistory. We have a stimulating and friendly community of Palaeolithic researchers at Sheffield, who fit into a wider community of researchers in Palaeoanthropology and hunter-gatherer studies in general.
Current research students
- Claire Fisher: The organisation of space on late Neanderthal and early modern human sites in Europe.
- Becky Wragg Sykes: Neanderthal landscape use in Britain.
- Rob Dinnis: The earliest anatomically modern humans in Britain and the Northern European Plain compared.
- Lynsay McColl: A statistical approach to the questions of Neanderthal extinction and Neanderthal and Modern human contemporaneity and contact (co-supervised with Dr Caitlin Buck, Dept. of Probability & Statistics).
- Kim Vickers: The Palaeoentomology of the North Atlantic Islands.
|
Exploring for Upper Palaeolithic cave art in Britain.
|
|
Britain’s first Palaeolithic cave art: drilling samples of stalactite for uranium-series dating.
|
|
|
