Stephen Shennan

Stephen Shennan has long-standing interests in the Neolithic and Bronze Age prehistory of Europe but since the late 1980s his research has been mainly focussed on exploring the use of method and theory from the study of biological evolution to understand cultural stability and change as an evolutionary process, taking up an agenda initially set by the work of Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman and Boyd and Richerson.

He is currently a Co-I of the ERC-funded Synergy project - COREX: From CORrelations to EXplanations: towards a new European prehistory - a collaboration involving the University of Gothenburg, University of Copenhagen, UCL (Division of Biosciences & the UCL Institute of Archaeology), University of Plymouth and the National Museum of Denmark. https://www.corex-erc.com/

He has held an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council for the project ‘EUROEVOL: Cultural Evolution of Neolithic Europe’. The aim of this project was to bring the different sub-fields of cultural evolutionary theory and method together in an integrated fashion and apply them to a large-scale case-study in prehistory, the European Neolithic, to address specific questions concerning the links between demographic, economic, social and cultural patterns and processes. In doing so, it has provided the basis for a new account of the role of farming in transforming early European societies, c.6000-2000 calBC. The databases resulting from it are unique – in that they allow a scale and scope of historical and regional analysis not previously possible.

In 2000, together with a group of colleagues, Stephen was successful in obtaining funding to set up a Centre for the Evolutionary Analysis of Cultural Behaviour at UCL, funded by the UK Art and Humanities of which he was Director 2001-2005; the Centre produced a major body of work on various aspects of cultural evolution.

He was a co-applicant and member of the second phase AHRC Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity (2006-2010), which was also very productive. In his own publications he has addressed a variety of different topics, including the use of neutral models of cultural change, applications of cladistic methods in archaeology and anthropology, the role of demography in relation to cultural evolution, and human behavioural ecology approaches to social institutions