Meet the Team
Editor
The Editor, Dr Robert Witcher, is Associate Professor in Archaeology at Durham University. He studied for a BA and MA at Newcastle University and a PhD at the University of Leicester. He then worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the British School at Rome before joining the Archaeology Department at Durham in 2004. His principal research interests are Roman and landscape archaeology in Italy and the Mediterranean. Prior to becoming Editor, he was Reviews and Deputy Editor from 2013-2017.
Reviews Editor
The Deputy and Reviews editor, Dr Dan Lawrence, is Assistant Professor in the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East at Durham University. He came to Durham for his PhD after undergraduate and masters degrees at University College London and Cambridge, and stayed on for a post-doc. His research focusses on landscape archaeology, and especially the impact the emergence of complex social phenomena such as cities and empires had on settlement and subsistence practices. As a remote sensing and GIS expert, Dan is also involved in heritage management and damage assessment in conflict regions across the Middle East.
Associate Editor
The Associate Editor, Dr Rebecca Gowland, is an Associate Professor in Bioarchaeology at Durham University. She studied for a BSc and PhD at Durham University and an MSc at the University of Sheffield. She has worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the Universities of Sheffield and Dundee and a Junior Research Fellow at St John's College, Cambridge, before joining the Archaeology Department in 2006. Her principal research interests include: the inter-relationship between the human skeleton and social identity; health and the life course in the Roman World; palaeopathology; and social perceptions of the physically impaired.
Editorial Manager
The Editorial Manager, Liz Ryan, has been working in journal publishing since 2007 managing a wide range of editorial offices for various publishing companies including Taylor & Francis and SAGE. She also works on a freelance basis providing editorial support and she is a member of the International Society of Managing and Technical Editors. Liz has a BA (Hons) in English Literature and Language from the University of Liverpool, and a MA in History from Teesside University. She is currently studying for a MA in Archaeology at Durham University focusing on the early medieval period. Liz is also involved in community archaeology with an emphasis on archaeology in northern England.
Deputy Editorial Manager
Thomas Swindells gained a BA and MA in English literature at Durham University. An Associate of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders, he operated his own proofreading and editing business prior to joining Antiquity in 2013, working within a range of academic disciplines and in association with several prominent journals, including Procedia and the Review of Islamic Economics. His research interests include Renaissance tragedy, Restoration poetry, and the Classics and historical fiction, alongside the works of Thomas Pynchon, Evelyn Waugh, and Graham Greene. He is also a published author of short stories and writes regularly on cinema.
Editorial Assistant
Ross gained a PhD in Archaeology and Anthropology from Durham University in 2015, following on from an MA in Anthropology and BA in Archaeology. An experienced field archaeologist and freelance human osteologist, his research expertise is in biomolecular archaeology, principally the analysis of ancient proteins. He currently teaches part time in the Archaeology Department at Durham University on topics within archaeological science and biomolecular archaeology. Ross has published in international archaeological journals, is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and a member of professional organisations including BABAO and the Society for Archaeological Sciences.
Editorial Assistant
James studied for an MPhil at Cambridge before completing his AHRC-funded PhD at Durham in 2015 with a thesis comparing adaptive trends in prehistoric hunting technology from an intercontinental perspective. His research interests lie in the archaeology and anthropology of hunter-gatherers from around the world, and the development of early humans throughout prehistory. He is an experienced field archaeologist, has worked as a research assistant in the Grahame Clark Laboratory for Zooarchaeology at Cambridge, and teaches and lectures part-time for the anthropology department at Durham. James also likes to play the ukulele.
Public Engagement and Press Officer
Tom read Ancient and Modern History at Oxford, before working for the BBC, predominantly researching for historical documentaries. He returned to academia with an MLitt (Distinction) in Medieval Archaeology and a PhD on Viking Age networks at Glasgow. Having trained as a Roman archaeologist on the Tiber and Sangro Valley projects, Tom has also assisted on WW2 aircraft wreck surveys, and has worked for commercial archaeology firms in his native Scotland. Tom has volunteered for years with Love Archaeology social media, and brings this interest in disseminating archaeological research to the widest possible audience to Antiquity.