Christopher Clarkson

Biography

Chris Clarkson is a professor in archaeology in the School of Social Science at the University of Queensland. He specialises in Indigenous Australian archaeology, Pleistocene southeast Asia, the dispersal of modern humans out of Africa and the role of stone tools in the evolution of human economy and cognition. Clarkson has collaborations with researchers and institutions in India, Saudi Arabia, East Timor, Indonesia, Africa, Canada, France and Belgium. He has active field projects in Arnhem Land with Manilikarr Traditional Owners, Arabia with an international team of Saudi and UK researchers, Africa exploring the origins of high-speed projectile technology, and Indonesia, exploring first peopling of the region and the impact of Last Glacial Maximum sea level rise. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries (FSA) of London and he has held four postdoctoral fellowships since 2004 (UQ 2005, DECRA 2006, QEII 2011, Future Fellowship 2017, Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies, University of Cambridge 2014, and a Beaufort Professorial Fellowships St Johns College, University of Cambridge 2018). In 2017, he was awarded the Shanghai Archaeology Forum Gold Medal for the ‘Field Discovery Award’ for groundbreaking work at Madjedbebe (with Mirarr Traditional Owners) which obtained the oldest date for human occupation of Australia. He is currently writing a book on the evolution of technology with Cambridge University Press.