Meet the Fellows: Mike Parker Pearson FSA

Meet the Fellows

The Society of Antiquaries is proud to bring together a distinguished community of scholars, practitioners, and enthusiasts dedicated to the study and stewardship of the material past. In our new Meet the Fellows series, we invite you to discover the diverse paths, passions and perspectives that animate our Fellowship today.

Through a series of conversations, Fellows reflect on the formative experiences that drew them to their disciplines, the sites and stories that have shaped their careers, and their hopes for the future of heritage, culture, and antiquarian study. Each interview offers a window into the richness and variety of our shared field — and celebrates the enduring spirit of inquiry and innovation that has defined the Society for more than three centuries.

We hope these profiles will inspire new connections, spark new conversations, and reaffirm the vital role that the study of the past plays in understanding our present and imagining our future.

Mike Parker Pearson FSA: Lives in the Landscape, Stories in the Stones

Before he was a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, before Stonehenge, before the deserts of Madagascar or the windswept Hebrides, Professor Mike Parker Pearson FSA was four years old, staring into gravel.

His parents, having bought a field in the Berkshire Downs to build a house, had laid a driveway. But for young Mike, it was a cosmos of fossils. Those minute, mineralised echoes of ancient life ignited something deep and durable.“I was hooked,” he says, still with the quiet fervour of a boy in awe.

There were local giants too—the White Horse at Uffington, the barrows above Lambourn, Wayland’s Smithy. And there was a book, found in the public library: Fun with Archaeology by C.A. Burland. It ended with a line he still recalls word for word, a line that offered both encouragement and responsibility: “…so that you not only get the greatest pleasure from archaeology, but can also make a real contribution to it.” And so he did.

From student digs on Melos to momentous fieldwork in southern Madagascar, Parker Pearson’s career has bent toward the voices of the past, not the objects they left behind. “I’m not that interested in the things,” he explains,“it’s what they tell us about people’s lives that matters.”

In 1977, as a young archaeologist on Colin Renfrew’s excavation of a Bronze Age shrine at Phylakopi, he and fellow student Mark Brisbane uncovered a cache of ceramic bulls. A strange and potent offering, perhaps, but only the first in a line of remarkable finds.

Years later, in Madagascar, he unearthed the royal capital of an eighteenth-century kingdom—and, unexpectedly, the truth behind a tale long dismissed as apocryphal. Robert Drury’s Journal, once thought a Defoean fiction, proved more historical than anyone dared guess. But even then, adventure edged the work. “We were briefly held hostage,” he notes, almost casually. “Very courteously—but our captors were heavily armed.”

Professor Parker Pearson is not without a sense of irony. He recounts with some amusement that he once had to be ruled out as a suspect in a murder investigation. “The landowner—Simon Dale—was convinced his house sat atop a Roman city of Armenian origin. He was murdered shortly after we visited, and we had to be fingerprinted and hand over our shoes to the police.”

His work, though often marked by oddity or peril, has remained grounded in a single idea: people matter more than things. “The misconception that we dig up things rather than the traces of people in the past is the main problem.” And archaeology, as he reminds us, isn’t all research and romance. For those toiling in the sector of commercial archaeology, practical realities may be far more grim. “Most archaeologists,” he says pointedly, “are part of the construction industry.”

If given the chance to preserve a single object, he would choose the handaxe from Hoxne reported by John Frere in 1797, now held in the Society’s own collection. “He didn’t know that it was 400,000 years old,” Parker Pearson says, “but his famous quote in Archaeologia marked the beginning of a new awareness about the antiquity of our species: ‘The situation in which these weapons were found may tempt us to refer them to a very remote period indeed; even beyond that of the present world.’”

Today, as a veteran of British and global field archaeology, he is proud to be a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. Elected in 1991, just after leaving English Heritage for the University of Sheffield, he praises the Society’s commitment to breadth: “We’re not locked into narrow fields. We’re part of something wider.”

And still he digs. The final volume of the Cladh Hallan project is due soon, and his work at Durrington Walls and Preseli continues. Were he granted the chance to sit with anyone from the past, whom would he choose? “John Aubrey or William Stukeley. They saw so much of the Stonehenge landscape before it was changed forever.” Still, he adds, “I feel so lucky to be an archaeologist in this moment. What we can do now would’ve seemed like magic to them.”

To aspiring archaeologists, his advice is pragmatic, generous, and reflective of broader changes in the profession. “Get involved wherever you can in gaining skills and experience. I was part of a very lucky generation of teenagers who were paid as rescue archaeologists by the Department of the Environment (formerly the Ministry of Works) before going to university. Unfortunately it’s almost impossible today to find such opportunities without having to pay. Join your local society!”

From the Cyclades to Stonehenge, from moments of danger to glimpses at the prehistoric, the career of Professor Mike Parker Pearson FSA embodies a quiet, unwavering dedication to the past—not as a trove of objects, but as a testament to human experience. What he uncovers is more than soil; it is the residue of memory. His work reveals that the past is not inert but intricate, interconnected, and resonant with those who once lived. It reminds us that archaeology is not only about stones—it is layered, relational, alive with the presence of those who once were; it is about voices, still speaking through time.

Article author

This interview was conducted by Elizabeth Gilkey. Elizabeth is an archaeologist and Society of Antiquaries volunteer whose research interests span Classical antiquity and heritage practice. She is presently completing postgraduate studies in Archaeology at University College London, having previously obtained a Master’s degree in Classical Civilisation from the University of London. She will commence a DPhil in Archaeology at the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term 2025.