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Professor Clive Gamble

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Professor Clive Gamble
Department of Geography
Royal Holloway
Egham, Surrey
TW20 0EX
UK

Phone: 01784- 414673
FAX: 01784-472836
E-mail: clive.gamble@rhul.ac.uk

Clive Gamble is Professor of Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London and a member of the Centre for Quaternary Research.

Clive is an archaeologist with a particular interest in our earliest origins and the evolution of human society. He has undertaken research in many parts of the world to answer the question; when and why did we become the only human species to achieve a global distribution? The answer combines quaternary science, and its insights into changing climates and resources, with an understanding from archaeological evidence of how our social lives developed over the past two million years. Clive has written three books exploring these questions.

Clive is currently a co-director of the British Academy Centenary Project From Lucy to language: the archaeology of the social brain that brings together a wide range of disciplines – psychology, archaeology, anthropology, primatology, evolutionary and quaternary science – to examine when hominid brains became human minds. This seven year project ends in 2010.
Forthcoming highlight: Social Brain, Distributed Mind edited by Robin Dunbar, Clive Gamble and John Gowlett British Academy December 2009.
He has recently completed an AHRC Resource Enhancement Project The Prehistoric Stones of Greece with Paraskevi Elefanti and Gil Marshall. For the first time at a national scale, it is now possible to view the results of over forty years of field survey in Greece. The Prehistoric Stones of Greece allows you to see the landscapes where Palaeolithic and Neolithic evidence has been recovered. The database and maps of this survey of surveys can be viewed at http://www.gg.rhul.ac.uk/sog/

He is also a Co-PI on the £3.4M NERC RESET  Consortium (Response of Humans to Abrupt Environmental Transitions http://c14.arch.ox.ac.uk/reset/embed.php?File). Clive, together with Rupert Housley, http://www.gg.rhul.ac.uk/Housley/ is investigating the chronology of human dispersal into northern Europe during the Lateglacial. Archaeological sites have been sampled in Germany, Poland, Belgium and France.

Watch Clive give his Worldwide University Network lecture on "Social technologies and social brains: 150 years of scientific Palaeolithic research". The lecture was given on April 27th 2009 the same day 150 years after human antiquity was established in a gravel pit in northern France. This scientific demonstration was one of the great turning points in archaeology and our understanding of human history.

Outline to the lecture: Exactly 150 years ago to the day Joseph Prestwich and John Evans established humanity’s geological antiquity in a gravel pit at St Acheul, a suburb of Amiens, northern France. The circumstances of their discovery set the pattern for much subsequent Palaeolithic research. I will begin this talk by reviewing the circumstances of their work on April 27th 1859 from the perspective of the history of science. Then I will develop the argument that the in-situ artefact they found and photographed that day has an agency that suggests other ways to examine the stone tools of the Palaeolithic. In particular the framework provided by the social brain hypothesis (that the social lives of hominins drove the enlargement of their brains) will be explored to look at aspects of behaviour that are not normally considered by Palaeolithic archaeologists. These include theory of mind and the evolution of social laughter. I will show how a concept of social technologies not only links us to pioneers such as Evans and Prestwich but also points to a dramatically different study of the Old Stone Age that they established.

Please click here for audio and presentation.

Read about the re-discovery of the stone that shattered the time barrier by Clive Gamble and Rob Kruszynski now published in Antiquity volume 83 pages 461-75

Hear Clive’s interview with BBC presenter Quentin Cooper recorded at the Society of Antiquaries on June 2nd 2009