Principal Investigator
Paul is the inaugural Jennifer Ward Oppenheimer Professor of the Deep History and Archaeology of Africa, in the Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge and the Mandela Magdalene Memorial Fellow at Magdalene College. He has a BA (1979) and MA (1984) in Archaeology and Anthropology, and a PhD in Archaeology (1986), all studied for at the University of Cambridge.
Paul’s first academic position (1989-91) was as a lecturer in Archaeology in the Department of History, University of Dar es Salaam, shortly after a degree course in Archaeology had been introduced. Paul then moved to the History Department, University of Botswana (1992-6) where he helped establish the University’s new degree programme in Archaeology and saw the first two cohorts of Batswana graduate in Archaeology. From 1998 to 2006, Paul was Director of the British Institute in Eastern Africa in Nairobi, where he had the opportunity to develop several projects on the later Holocene archaeology of the region and build new collaborations with East African colleagues. This led to a four-year research post at the University of York focusing on the historical ecology of East African landscapes (2007-11) that transitioned into a senior lectureship in Archaeology. In 2013, Paul was appointed Professor of Global Archaeology at Uppsala University and continued his research on the historical ecology of pastoralist societies in East Africa and processes of landscape domestication and resilience. Paul took up his current post at the University of Cambridge in June 2018 and has retained close ties with Uppsala University.
I’m most passionate about Africa’s rich and temporally deep archaeology partly because it is so diverse and revealing about human history and partly because of the opportunity it provides to engage in cross-disciplinary research that links deep-time perspectives with contemporary social and ecological challenges, enabling alternative visions for the future. This feeds another passion of mine: trying to level the academic playing field for scholars and students in sub-Saharan Africa and providing opportunities to engage as equal partners in archaeological research alongside researchers based in institutions in the Global North.
Besides African archaeology, Paul’s interests include sports diving, Cornish history, contemporary fiction, and the wellbeing of the family’s two elderly cats.
Read more about Paul on the University of Cambridge website.