Professor Clive Gamble

Archaeology
University of Southampton
Avenue Campus
Highfield
Southampton
SO17 1BF

Position: Professor

Research interests

Clive Gamble founded CAHO in 2001 to provide training in the skills and scope of the Palaeolithic and to undertake archaeological research into human origins. What drives his own research is the desire to understand the social lives of ancient hominins and how these evolved. In the 10 years since CAHO started, greatly aided by a Research Professorship in the Centre for Quaternary Research at Royal Holloway, University of London, Clive has investigated hominins as individuals, groups and colonisers of new habitats during the last 6 million years. He was a Co-Director on the British Academy Centenary project (2003-2010) Lucy to language: The archaeology of the social brain that brought together Palaeolithic archaeologists and evolutionary psychologists to address the key question; when did hominin brains become human minds? He worked with William Davies on the radiocarbon and genetic evidence for the re-colonisation of Western Europe, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, and with Paraskevi Elefanti and Gilbert Marshall on an AHRC project http://www.gg.rhul.ac.uk/sog/ that draws together all the evidence from field-surveys for Palaeolithic and Mesolithic settlement in Greece. He is currently participates in the NERC RESET consortium that is tracing the eruptions of volcanic ash over the last 60,000 years to provide greater accuracy and precision in the dating of key evolutionary events in Europe. These include the arrival of modern humans, the extinction of the Neanderthals and the re-colonisation of northern Europe 16000 years ago by people from whom most Europeans today are directly descended.

Among his current projects is the publication by English Heritage of Britain’s flagship Neanderthal site at Lynford in Norfolk. Here well-preserved mammoth bones and stone tools were found together in a stream channel. His current book projects include a worldwide review of Global settlement, for Cambridge University Press, and an overview of the Social Brain project to be published by Thames and Hudson.

The Palaeolithic is only 150 years old. On a spring afternoon in 1859 John Evans and Joseph Prestwich authenticated the antiquity of Palaeolithic stone tools in a gravel pit in northern France. During the anniversary celebrations in 2009 of that scientific proof Clive set out to search for the in-situ stone tool they had found and photographed. This handaxe is an important artefact in the history of Nineteenth Century science but it had been forgotten and for many years had fallen from sight. Thanks to wise curatorship in the Natural History Museum it was tracked down and is now recognised as the foundation stone of all subsequent Palaeolithic studies.

Biographical notes

Recent publications:

Books

Gamble, C. S. 2007. Origins and revolutions: human identity in earliest prehistory. New York: Cambridge University Press.

—. in preparation. Global settlement: a world prehistory Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

—. in preparation. Dunbar, R., C. Gamble, and J. A. J. Gowlett From Small Beginnings: The evolution of human brains, social life and the elaboration of culture. London: Thames and Hudson.

Edited Books

Gamble, C. S., and M. Porr. Editors. 2005. The individual hominid in context: archaeological investigations of Lower and Middle Palaeolithic landscapes, locales and artefacts. London: Routledge.

Dunbar, R., C. Gamble, and J. A. J. Gowlett. Editors. 2010. Social brain and distributed mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Proceedings of the British Academy 158.

Boismier, W. A., C. S. Gamble, and F. Coward. Editors. 2011 in press. Neanderthals among mammoths: excavations at Lynford Quarry, Norfolk, UK. London: English Heritage Monographs.

Social brain papers

Gamble, C.S. 2008. "Kinship and material culture: archaeological implications of the human global diaspora," in Kinship and Evolution. Edited by N. J. Allen, H. Callan, R. Dunbar, and W. James, pp. 27-40. Oxford: Blackwell.

Gamble, C. S., J. A. J. Gowlett, and R. Dunbar. 2011. The social brain and the shape of the Palaeolithic. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 21 115-135.

Coward, F., and C. Gamble. 2008. Big brains, small worlds: material culture and the evolution of mind. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 363:1969-1979.

—. 2010. "Materiality and Metaphor in Earliest Prehistory," in The Cognitive Life of Things. Edited by L. Malafouris and C. Renfrew, pp. 47-58. Cambridge: McDonald Institute of Archaeological Research.

Foley, R., and C. Gamble. 2009. The ecology of social transitions in human evolution. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B 364:3267-3279.

1859 and the missing stone

Gamble, C., S, and R. Kruszynski. 2009. John Evans, Joseph Prestwich and the stone that shattered the time barrier. Antiquity 83:461-475.

Gamble, C., S, and T. Moutsiou. 2011. The time revolution of 1859 and the stratification of the primeval mind. Notes and Records of the Royal Society 65:43-63.

Recolonisation and dispersal

Gamble, C.S. 2009. Human display and dispersal: a case study from biotidal Britain in the Middle and Upper Pleistocene. Evolutionary Anthropology 18:144-156.

Gamble, C. S., S. W. G. Davies, M. Richards, P. Pettitt , and L. Hazelwood. 2005. Archaeological and genetic foundations of the European population during the Lateglacial: implications for 'agricultural thinking'. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 15:55-85.

Gamble, C. S., W. Davies, P. Pettitt, and M. Richards. 2004. Climate change and evolving human diversity in Europe during the last glacial. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society Biological Sciences 359:243-254.

Müller, U. C., J. Pross, P. C. Tzedakis, C. Gamble, U. Kotthoff, G. Schmiedl, S. Wulf, and K. Christanis. 2010. The role of climate in the spread of modern humans into Europe. Quaternary Science Reviews on-line version.

On-line databases

Marshall, G., C. S. Gamble, and D. Roe. 2002. "Lower Palaeolithic technology, raw material and population ecology." York: Archaeological Data Service, AHDS. http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/specColl/bifaces/index.cfm.

Elefanti, P., Marshall,G and Gamble C.S The prehistoric stones of Greece http://www.gg.rhul.ac.uk/sog/