Michael Parker Pearson, (born 26 June 1957) is an English archaeologist specialising in the study of the Neolithic British Isles, Madagascar and the archaeology of death and burial. A professor at the UCL Institute of Archaeology, he 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.
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 in Wiltshire. He also appeared in the National Geographic Channel documentary Stonehenge Decoded, along with the PBS programme Nova: Secrets of Stonehenge.
Early life and education
Parker Pearson was born in 1957, in Wantage, Berkshire. He would later inform interviewers that he first took an interest in the past when searching for fossils in his father's driveway gravel aged 4, extending that interest into the human past aged 6 when he read a library book entitled Fun with Archaeology. Deciding to study the subject at the undergraduate level, he attended the University of Southampton, attaining a first class BA with honours in Archaeology in 1979.
He obtained his PhD from King's College, Cambridge in 1985, for a thesis titled "Death, society and social change: the Iron Age of southern Jutland 200 BC – 600 AD" in which he discussed what was known about the bog bodies of Iron Age Denmark; it would remain unpublished.
Early career
From 1984 through to 1990, Parker Pearson worked as an Inspector of Monuments for English Heritage, The archaeologists also postulated that the circle also contained a hole from one stone which had a distinctive pentagonal shape, very closely matching the one pentagonal stone at Stonehenge (stone hole 91 at Waun Mawn and stone 62 at Stonehenge). Both circles appear, according to some researchers, to be oriented towards the midsummer solstice. and reported in New Scientist on 20 February 2021.
Two geological articles published in 2022 proved that there was no link between Waun Mawn and the supposed "bluestone quarries" at Craig Rhosyfelin and Carn Goedog, and no link between Waun Mawn and Stonehenge. In a 2024 study published in The Holocene, Brian John re-examined the geological and archaeological evidence from the site, and concluded that the "lost circle" of standing stones had never existed, and that there was no evidence to demonstrate a link with Stonehenge. He concluded that there had been considerable "interpretative inflation" at the site, driven by a desire to show a Stonehenge connection.
Other activities
From 2006 through to 2009, he served as the vice-president of the Prehistoric Society. has given interviews to groups such as Pagans for Archaeology
In 2012, Parker Pearson left the University of Sheffield and began teaching at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, as Professor of British Later Prehistory.
Bibliography
{| class="wikitable plainrowheaders sortable"
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! scope="col" | Title
! scope="col" | Year
! scope="col" | Co-author(s)
! scope="col" | Publisher
! scope="col" class="unsortable" | ISBN
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! scope="row" |
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! scope="row" | Bronze Age Britain
| 1993
| n/a
| English Heritage and B.T. Batsford
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! scope="row" | Architecture and Order: Approaches to Social Space
| 1994
| Colin Richards<br/>(edited volume)
| Routledge
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! scope="row" | The Archaeology of Death and Burial
| 1999
|n/a
| Sutton Publishing
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! scope="row" | Between Land and Sea: Excavations at Dun Vulan, South Uist
| 1999
| Niall Sharples, Jacqui Mulville, Helen Smith,<br/>(edited volume)
| Sheffield Academic Press
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! scope="row" | In Search of the Red Slave: Shipwreck and Captivity in Madagascar
| 2002
| Karen Godden
| Sutton Publishing
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! scope="row" | Food, Culture and Identity in the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age
| 2003
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| British Archaeological Reports
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! scope="row" | Fiskerton: An Iron Age Timber Causeway with Iron Age and Roman Votive Offerings
| 2003
| Naomi Field
| Oxbow
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! scope="row" | South Uist: Archaeology and History of a Hebridean Island
| 2004
| Niall Sharples and Jim Symonds
| The History Press
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! scope="row" | Warfare, Violence and Slavery in Prehistory: Proceedings of a Prehistoric Society Conference at Sheffield University
| 2005
| I.J.N. Thorpe<br/>(edited volume)
| British Archaeological Reports
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! scope="row" | From Stonehenge to the Baltic: Living with Cultural Diversity in the Third Millennium BC
| 2007
| Mats Larsson
| British Archaeological Reports
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! scope="row" | Pastoralists, Warriors and Colonists: The Archaeology of Southern Madagascar
| 2010
| Karen Godden<br/>(edited volume)
| British Archaeological Reports
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! scope="row" | If Stones Could Speak: Unlocking the Secrets of Stonehenge
| 2010
| Marc Aronson
| National Geographic Society
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! scope="row" | Stonehenge: Exploring the Greatest Stone Age Enigma
| 2012
| n/a
| Simon & Schuster
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! scope="row" | From Machair to Mountains: Archaeological Survey and Excavation in South Uist
| 2012
| (edited volume)
| Oxbow
|
|-
|}
References
Footnotes
Bibliography
External links
- UCL INSTITUTE OF ARCHAEOLOGY – Mike Parker Pearson
- Fieldwork at Stonehenge featured in PBS/Nova's "Secrets of Stonehenge" (2010)