James Walker is a postdoctoral researcher on the European
Research Council-funded Europe's Lost Frontiers project, working with Prof.
Vince Gaffney and colleagues on the archaeological aspects of a project aimed
at discovering more about the lost, submerged prehistoric landscape of
Doggerland, now the base of the North Sea. He received a BA (Hons) from Durham
University in 2008 and an MPhil from the University of Cambridge in 2009. He
holds a PhD from Durham University in 2014. He served as a research assistant
in the Grahame Clark Zooarchaeology Laboratory, University of Cambridge, from
2014 to 2016 and as an editorial assistant for the journal Antiquity from 2015
to 2018. He served as a lecturing/teaching assistant for the Department of
Anthropology (Human Evolution and Evolutionary Anthropology) at Durham
University from 2016 to 2018. His main research focus is on the investigation
of archaeological materials and cultural heritage that lay underwater. In
particular, his interests lie in the landscapes as they evolved from the final
Pleistocene into the mid-late Holocene.
Vincent Gaffney studied archaeology at
the University of Reading and is now the Anniversary Chair in Landscape
Archaeology at the University of Bradford, where he is a member of the
Submerged Landscapes Research Centre. He has undertaken landscape research
across the UK, Continental Europe, America, and Africa, and this has included
studies on World Heritage Sites such as Stonehenge, Diocletian’s Palace, the
Stari Grad field in Croatia, and Cyrene in Libya. His recent major awards
include funding for the AHRC Unpath’d Waters and Taken at the Flood projects,
an ERC Advanced Grant (Europe’s Lost Frontiers), and most recently as a PI on
the ERC Synergy Grant Subnordica. His awards for archaeological and heritage
research include the 2013 European Archaeology Heritage Prize for his work on
marine palaeolandscapes and the Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Higher Education.
In 2018, he was awarded an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list for his
contributions to science.
Dr Rachel
Harding is currently a Seismic Mapping Research Associate at the Submerged
Landscapes Research Centre, University of Bradford as part of the AHRC Unpath’d
Waters project. In 2015, she
completed her PhD at the University of Manchester, focusing on the Late Miocene
to Pleistocene seismic stratigraphy of the southern North Sea. Rachel also
holds a MSc in petroleum geoscience (2008-09) from the University of Manchester
and a BSc (Hons) in environmental earth science from the University of East
Anglia. Rachel has private sector experience in energy consultancy and climate
change advocacy with The Carbon Literacy Project. She has also worked on
postdoctoral projects with the Stratigraphy Group at the University of
Manchester and contributed to the ERC-funded Europe’s Lost Frontiers project at the University of Bradford. Her
current research interests include palaeolandscape reconstruction using
geophysics and core data, sea level change, sequence stratigraphy, and salt
tectonics.
Simon Fitch is a research fellow at the University of
Bradford. He has led the seismic mapping aspect of the ERC-funded Europe’s Lost
Frontiers project and has a longstanding interest in the study of submerged
landscapes. His continuing research focuses on the study of submerged
Mesolithic and Late Palaeolithic landscapes worldwide and the investigation of
the impacts of environmental and landscape change upon human populations during
prehistory. He is leading the Life on the Edge project, using high-resolution
seismic data and novel sampling techniques to locate and map submerged Late
Palaeolithic landscapes.
