Division of Archaeology

People

Prof. A.J. Legge

Affiliated Scholar, Department of Archaeology and Senior Fellow, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research

Email: ajl68@cam.ac.uk

Entry in the University's Lookup directory service (restricted access)

Anthony Legge is Senior Fellow at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, having joined as a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellow to complete his work on the fauna of Tell Abu Hureyra in Syria. He was formerly Professor of Environmental Archaeology at Birkbeck College in the University of London. During this time, besides fieldwork, he has made academic exchange visits to Australia, Portugal and Russia.

Research interests

My work has been concerned with the origins and dispersal of farming, particularly in relation to Neolithic and Bronze Age settlements in South- West Asia and in Europe. I have a special interest is in the early domestication of animals and the dispersal of farming. This has led me to work at sites in Syria, Cyprus, Greece, Serbia, Turkmesistan, Croatia, Spain and Britain. Most recently a three-year project in Croatia, in association with the University of Rochester (USA) and the University of Zagreb (Croatia), has excavated two Neolithic sites, which have thrown much new light on the dispersal of early farming though Dalmatia.

My long-term research at Cambridge lies with the site of Tell Abu Hureyra in Syria, one of the few sites in South-West Asia that has good evidence for the early emergence of the first farmers there, which arose largely from an indigenous, settled Mesolithic community. Volume I of this work has been published and my work now is concerned with compiling the databases of the faunal remains. The final aim is for all of the faunal data, of bone identifications, bone preservation, bone measurements and the archaeological context of each find, should all be accessible to researchers, to be downloaded from the Abu Hureyra web site.

Miscellanea

Bone measurements and body weights from some Australian feral pigs.

I have scanned a copy of J.B. Simonds' The age of the ox, sheep, and pig of 1854 and Richard H. Meadow converted it to a useful format. I believe it to be in the public domain and it is available as a ~25 MB PDF. Sorry about the size.