Department of Archaeology

People

John Robb

Reader in European Prehistory and editor of the Cambridge Archaeological Journal

Office: G05, Faculty Building.
Phone: +44 (0) 1223 339004
Fax: +44 (0) 1223 333503.
Email: jer39@cam.ac.uk
Entry in the University's Lookup directory service (restricted access)

Current research interests

My research interests are quite varied. The major field area in which I have worked is Mediterranean prehistory; my own fieldwork has involved survey and excavation of Neolithic and Bronze Age sites in Calabria, Southern Italy. As co-director of the Bova Marina Archaeological Project, I run an annual field season at the southernmost tip of the Italian peninsula. In the past, most of my research there has been excavating Neolithic sites; currently my colleagues and I are excavating Bronze Age, Classical Greek and medieval sites and carrying out various landscape studies.

Theoretically, my research interests involve the body, theories of agency, models of long-term change in prehistory and prehistoric art. For example, one current research project is a survey of Neolithic human body imagery in Europe which traces how specific regional traditions of representation interacted with the agency of art producers and local social and political settings to form the corpuses which have come down to us.

I also work in human skeletal studies; my principal areas of interest in human bone studies, in recent years, concern skeletal signs of activity, lifestyle, and trauma, cultural modification of the human body, and the ways in which skeletal studies and cultural theorisations of the body can be brought into juxtaposition.

  • Neolithic Europe
  • Human skeletal studies
  • Archaeological theory
  • Agency theory
  • Central Mediterranean prehistory
  • Approaches to prehistoric art

Current Research Projects