Kate Anderson BA, MSc

Postgraduate research student

I have been a student at The University of Southampton on an off since 2010, completing both my BA (2010-2013) and MSc (2019-202) within the Archaeology department. Between my BA and MSc, I spent several years working in a number of museums. During this time, I focused largely on producing exhibitions and cataloguing collections.

It was during my MSc that I started looking into the role social learning played within the Acheulean techno-complex. My dissertation used a comparative approach, aiming to establish whether the Roe method (now over 50 years old) could still stand up as an approach to tool categorising against the newer Geometric Morphometric approaches that have been developed in more recent years. It was through this analysis that I started to look at the manufacturing process itself as a way to delve deeper into hominin behaviour. Both the Roe and GMM methods explore the finished tool, and I became interested in the thought processes, decisions and techniques that had gone into the tool production. It was this that led me to continue onto a PhD in early 2021 under the supervision of Dr. John McNabb. My PhD research involves studying the manufacture of Acheulean handaxes as a way to explore hominin behaviour, focusing on social learning as a means through which to transfer manufacturing skills and techniques.

I am one of a team who co-organise the CAHO seminar series and are organising the Unravelling the Palaeolithic conference scheduled for March 2023.