John Anthony Jamys Gowlett, FBA, FSA, FRAI, is an archaeologist. Since 2000, he has been Professor of Archaeology and Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Liverpool. He completed his doctorate at the University of Cambridge, which was awarded in 1979, before working as Senior Archaeologist to the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator from 1980 to 1987."Prof John Gowlett"
''University of Liverpool''. Retrieved 12 April 2018."Professor John Gowlett"
''British Academy''. Retrieved 12 April 2018. Gowlett studied

handaxes A hand axe (or handaxe or Acheulean hand axe) is a prehistoric stone tool with two faces that is the longest-used tool in human history, yet there is no academic consensus on what they were used for. It is made from stone, usually flint or cher ...

at the Kilombe Archaeological site in

Kenya ) , national_anthem = "Ee Mungu Nguvu Yetu"() , image_map = , map_caption = , image_map2 = , capital = Nairobi , coordinates = , largest_city = Nairobi , ...

for his PhD and continues to excavate there today. In the 1990s he ran excavations at the ~400,000 year old

Acheulian Acheulean (; also Acheulian and Mode II), from the French ''acheuléen'' after the type site of Saint-Acheul, is an archaeological industry of stone tool manufacture characterized by the distinctive oval and pear-shaped "hand axes" associated ...

site of Beeches Pit in

Suffolk Suffolk () is a ceremonial county of England in East Anglia. It borders Norfolk to the north, Cambridgeshire to the west and Essex to the south; the North Sea lies to the east. The county town is Ipswich; other important towns include Lowes ...

, also known for early evidence of fire use.

Honours

In July 2017, Gowlett was elected a

Fellow of the British Academy Fellowship of the British Academy (FBA) is an award granted by the British Academy to leading academics for their distinction in the humanities and social sciences. The categories are: # Fellows – scholars resident in the United Kingdom # C ...

(FBA), the United Kingdom's

national academy A national academy is an organizational body, usually operating with state financial support and approval, that co-ordinates scholarly research activities and standards for academic disciplines, most frequently in the sciences but also the humanit ...

for the humanities and social sciences."Elections to the British Academy celebrate the diversity of UK research"
''British Academy'', 5 August 2017. Retrieved 12 April 2018.

Selected works

* "Human Evolution and the Archaeology of the Social Brain", ''Current Anthropology'', vol. 53, no. 6 (2012), pp. 693–722. * (Edited with R. I. M. Dunbar and C. S. Gamble) ''Lucy to Language: The Benchmark Papers'' (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). * (Edited with R. I. M. Dunbar and C. S. Gamble) ''Thinking Big: How the Evolution of Social Life shaped the Human Mind'' (London: Thames and Hudson, 2014). * "Variability in an early hominin percussive tradition: the Acheulean versus cultural variation in modern chimpanzee artefacts", ''Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B—Biological Sciences'', vol. 370, no. 1682 (2015). * "The discovery of fire by humans: a long and convoluted process", ''Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B—Biological Sciences'', vol. 371, no. 1696 (2016).

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Gowlett, John Living people British archaeologists Alumni of the University of Cambridge Academics of the University of Liverpool Fellows of the British Academy Fellows of the Society of Antiquaries of London Fellows of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland Year of birth missing (living people)