Co-investigator for Mali
Kevin is Professor of African Archaeology at University College London (UCL) Institute of Archaeology. He has a PhD in Archaeology from the University of Cambridge (1994), and studied for his undergraduate degree in Anthropology at Rice University (1989).
As an undergraduate, Kevin started out doing cultural anthropology and/or archaeology in East Asia, but his friendship with another student (Tereba Togola) led him into West African archaeology and history instead. After a year spent living and working in Mali and Senegal as a Thomas J. Watson Fellow, Kevin began his PhD at Cambridge on polity-building and ethnic diversity along the Niger c. 2000 BC to AD 300. This research involved survey and excavation in three regions of Mali (the Haute Vallée, the Méma, and the Gourma). Luckily, in 1994, Kevin went directly from finishing his doctorate into a lectureship in African Archaeology at UCL. He has been there ever since, continuing field research in West Africa, being appointed to London’s first ever Professorship in African Archaeology in 2011.
Kevin first became involved in Malian archaeological research in 1986 and regularly co-directed archaeological and anthropological fieldwork in Mali between 1989 and 2014 – working in many different regions of the country. All of these many seasons of Malian research were undertaken collaboratively with Tereba Togola, Seydou Camara and/or Daouda Keita. Kevin’s books include Ethnic Ambiguity and the African Past (Left Coast/ Routledge 2015), Slavery in Africa: Archaeology and Memory (Oxford University Press 2011) and African Re-Genesis: Confronting Social Issues in the Diaspora (Left Coast Press 2006), as well as nearly 100 other academic publications dealing with the origins of African agriculture and social complexity, historic West African polities, slavery, and cultural properties issues both in the United States and Africa. Kevin has also co-directed field research in Mauritania (Dhar Nema), Senegal (Waalo), and the United States (Cane River, Louisiana). His former doctoral students hold positions in eight different countries.
I believe in multi-disciplinary approaches to the past and oppose prescriptive categories and deterministic models. In particular, I support constructing narratives which include the recording of local oral histories and memories of place. In terms of material culture and settlement-based research, I favour attribute-based approaches, or those based on local taxonomies, to typological ones imposed from the exterior.
In his spare time, he enjoys playing baroque violin and viola, as well as Scots fiddle, and publishing regularly on musicology and the violin market.
Read more about Kevin on the UCL website.