Professor Graeme Barker is Disney Professor of Archaeology Emeritus at the University of Cambridge, a Senior Research Fellow in the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, and a Professorial Fellow at St John’s College Cambridge. He was elected a British Academy Fellow in 1999.
His research interests focus on the relations, both short- and long-term, between people and environment in the past, an interest he has pursued in temperate, tropical, semi-arid and arid regions of the world, the latter including Libya and Jordan.
He was a member of the British Academy’s review committee of the British Schools and Institutes that in 1994 recommended the establishment of CBRL. In 1996-2000 he co-directed the multi-period and multi-disciplinary study of the landscape archaeology of Wadi Faynan in southern Jordan that was published in 2008 as the CBRL monograph Archaeology and Desertification.
He is currently leading a team investigating Neanderthal responses to climate change in Shanidar Cave in Iraqi Kurdistan. He was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1979, a Fellow of the British Academy in 1999, and CBE in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours for 2015 for his services to archaeology.
He was elected to the CBRL board of trustees in December 2017. He is the chair of research and publications sub-committees.