Richard Jennings

Biography

My archaeological career began in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Auckland, where I graduated with a BA in Anthropology and Near Eastern History and a MA in GIS Applications in Archaeology. Like many kiwis, I then travelled aboard to see the world and to gain some overseas work experience. The northern hemisphere has since become my home. I spent a good few years excavating on commercial archaeological projects in the UK and Ireland and on a range of fascinating research projects, including the Palaeolithic site of Boxgrove, England, Buittle medieval motte and Bailey, Scotland, Tell Brak, Syria, and on Neanderthal levels in Gorham’s and Vanguard Caves in Gibraltar. The latter sites inspired me to undertake a doctorate at the University of Oxford on the analysis of Neanderthal and Homo sapiens site distributions and environments of southern Iberia in the late Pleistocene, and on the excavation of Palaeolithic levels in Higueral de Valleja Cave, Cadiz Province. On the completion of my doctorate in 2008, I gained invaluable experience as an excavation director and GIS officer by working for two years on many cultural heritage projects with Kilkenny Archaeology in Ireland, including the excavation a prehistoric cemetery complex and the design and implementation of an urban archaeological database of Kilkenny City. I then took up short term lecturing positions at Oxford Brookes University, The Department of Continuing Education, Oxford, and at University College Cork, where I designed and taught modules on Human Origins and World Archaeology. While in Cork I became involved on two Palaeolithic research projects in the southern Caucasus and the Arabian Peninsula. I subsequently moved back to Oxford to become a GIS and climate modelling specialist on the Palaeodeserts Project, which explores human prehistory and environments in Arabia, and the Eamena Project, which records endangered sites in the Middle East and North Africa using Arches, an innovative open source heritage management database developed by the Getty Conservation Institute and the World Monuments Fund. In 2016 I was appointed to a senior lectureship in Archaeology in the School of Natural Sciences and Psychology at Liverpool John Moores University. Gibraltar remains a central part of my research and teaching activities. I am an excavation director on the Gorham’s Cave Project and bring students from LJMU for accredited training in archaeological field survey methods and excavation techniques. My knowledge of spatial databases has enabled a further collaboration to develop between the Gibraltar Museum and LJMU whereby we are in the process of designing a heritage database for Gibraltar using Arches, beginning with its World Heritage Site. Elsewhere, I’m part of an Arches project focused on recording cultural heritage damage in Syria with the University of Durham, and another on mapping early archaeological sites of the Pacific with the University of Waikato. I am a co-Principal Investigator of the Dungarvan Valley Caves Project, which was awarded funding by the Royal Irish Academy to excavate Pleistocene deposits in Ballynamintra Cave, Ireland.

Research Interest

Natural Sciences and Psychology