Category: People

James Woodburn is the world’s leading theorist on egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies; he has just returned from visiting the Hadza people of Tanzania.

After carrying out two years of field research on a ‘cargo cult’ in New Britain, Papua New Guinea in the late eighties, Harvey Whitehouse developed a theory of ‘modes of religiosity’ that has been the subject of extensive critical evaluation and testing by anthropologists, historians, archaeologists, and cognitive scientists. In recent years, he has focused…

Charles Whitehead was creative director of an advertising agency for twenty years before gaining his PhD in social anthropology at University College London. He teaches anthropology to cognitive science students at the University of Westminster, and is currently involved in brain imaging research on pretend play at the Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience. His research…

David Wengrow lectures at the Institute of Archaeology.

Dr Ivan Tacey is a lecturer in Anthropology and Criminology at the University of Plymouth. His research interests include hunter-gatherers, animism, environmental relations, globalization, place making, and violence. His long-term research with Batek hunter-gatherers of Peninsular Malaysia explored how interconnectivity, environmental change and socio-political marginalization have led to realignments of these indigenous peoples’ animistic practices…

Thea Skaanes is Managing Curator of the UNESCO collections at the Moesgaard Museum, Denmark. The author of many scientific papers, she has conducted extensive field research into the material culture, social life and cosmology of the Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania. Her writing and lecturing has been described as ‘dripping from blood, taboo, darkness, ancestors and…

Paula Sheppard is a Research Fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Rebecca Sear is a demographer, anthropologist and human behavioural ecologist, and uses an interdisciplinary approach to understand human behaviour. In particular, she is keen to promote a greater understanding of evolutionary explanations for human behaviour in the social and health sciences. Rebecca works on questions of demographic and public health interest, including fertility, child health…

Richard Seaford is emeritus professor of Ancient Greek at the University of Exeter. His work on Athenian tragedy and religion has led him to investigate the historical conditions for the radical development of Greek culture in the sixth century BC (sometimes called the origin of European culture), and to argue that a crucial factor in…