Mike Parker Pearson

Who is Mike Parker Pearson?

Michael 'Mike' Parker Pearson, FSA, FSA Scot is an English archaeologist specialising in the study of the Neolithic British Isles, Madagascar and the archaeology of death and burial. A lecturer at the UCL Institute of Archaeology, he has previously worked for 25 years as a professor at the University of Sheffield in England, and was the director of the Stonehenge Riverside Project. A prolific author, he has also written a variety of books on the subject.

Parker Pearson gained his BA in archaeology from Southampton University in 1979. Supervised by Ian Hodder, at university Parker Pearson was a contemporary of Sheena Crawford, Daniel Miller, Henrietta Moore, Christopher Tilley and Alice Welbourn; these students adopted Hodder's structuralist ideas, then a pioneering part of the post-processualist current within archaeological theory. He went on to gain his PhD at the University of Cambridge in 1985, producing a thesis on burials and bog bodies in Iron Age Denmark.

A media personality, Parker Pearson has appeared several times in the Channel 4 show Time Team in particular in one looking at the excavation of Durrington Walls.