Stephen Shennan

Stephen Shennan did his BA and PhD in Archaeology at the University of Cambridge. From Cambridge he went to the University of Southampton, where he held a number of positions, becoming Professor in 1995. In 1996 he moved to the Institute of Archaeology, UCL, as Professor of Theoretical Archaeology. In 2005 he became Director of the Institute of Archaeology.   Since the late 1980s his interests have been mainly focussed on exploring the use of method and theory from the study of biological evolution to understanding cultural stability and change. In 2000 he and a group of colleagues were successful in obtaining funding to set up a Centre for the Evolutionary Analysis of Culture at UCL, of which he was Director 2001-2006. His many publications include Quantifying Archaeology (2nd ed. 1997), Genes, Memes and Human History: Darwinian Archaeology and Cultural Evolution (2002), and Pattern and Process in Cultural Evolution (edited, 2009). He currently holds an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council for the project ‘Cultural Evolution of Neolithic Europe’. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2006.