William Rendu

William Rendu is a CNRS researcher in Prehistory and Zooarchaeology at CIRHUS. After a PhD at the Université Bordeaux 1 and a Post Doctorat at the University of Michigan, he occupied a position of lecturer at the University of Toulouse II – Le Mirail and became in 2010 a CNRS researcher at the TRACES Laboratory in Toulouse. His work focuses on the late Neandertal and the first Anatomically Modern Human populations in Southwestern Europe and in the Middle East. His main fields of investigation encompass the impact of the climatic conditions on the Palaeolithic society organization, settlement strategies and Neandertal symbolic behavior. He is also interested in the methodological development of skeleto-chronological analyses to discuss the seasonal organization of the hunting activities of past hunter-gatherer populations. He is involved in numerous field projects and has directed the excavation of the famous Middle Paleolithic site of La Chapelle-aux-Saints.