Professor Clive Gamble
Emeritus Professor
(023) 8059 2297
Clive.Gamble@soton.ac.uk
Clive Gamble is Emeritus Professor of Archaeology at the University of Southampton.
During my archaeological career I have led research projects and published widely on the archaeology of human origins. I undertook pioneering research into the social life of our earliest ancestors. I continue to have a particular interest in when, and why, we became a global species? To answer these questions my research has led me into many parts of the world, some of them remote. The key to understanding why this remarkable process that settled the earth took place so late in human evolution involves building and leading teams of Palaeolithic archaeologists, evolutionary psychologists, geneticists, quaternary scientists and anthropologists. The central issue is the evolutionary relationship between an expanding hominin brain, selected by the benefits of larger group sizes, and its extension across time and space by material means.
I am President of the Prehistoric Society, Fellow of the British Academy, Fellow and former Vice President of the Society of Antiquaries and Fellow and former President of the Royal Anthropological Institute. From 2010 -2018 I was a Trustee of the British Museum.
I have supervised thirty seven PhD students, many of whom are now Professors, Associate Professors, Senior lecturers and Lecturers in UK and International Universities.
I have recently completed two funded projects. Crossing the threshold: dynamic transformation in hominin societies during the Late Middle Pleistocene is supported by a major AHRC grant (2013-16) and has at its heart a re-imagining of the long sequence of lithics and fauna at La Cotte de St Brelade in Jersey. The Research Fellows on the project are Dr Andy Shaw and Dr Marie-Anne Julien. Other project members are Dr Matt Pope, Dr Beccy Scott and Dr John McNabb. Seasonality, Mobility and Storage in Palaeolithic hunting societies is supported by a Leverhulme Trust grant (2014-2017). Here I am testing a model with Dr Alex Pryor and Dr Alistair Pike to determine food storage using seasonality data from charcoal and bone isotopes. We are collaborating with colleagues in Cambridge, Professor Martin Jones, Dr Tamsin O’Connell, Dr Rhiannon Stevens, Dr Philip Nigst and Dr David Beresford-Jones.
I am writing an account of The time revolution of 1859 and beginning work on The things that made us human. I am a project member of the ERC funded ACROSS Project, led by Dr Helen Farr, and which examines the colonisation of south east Asia and Australia.