Universitetet i Bergen

Universitetet i Bergen (UiB) 🇳🇴

The University of Bergen (UiB) is an internationally recognised research university with several centres of excellence. It was founded in 1946, making it Norway’s second oldest public university. UiB is the most cited university in Norway. There are seven faculties at UiB and there is a total of 16,900 students and 3,600 staff at the university. The Department of Archaeology, History, Cultural Studies and Religion – AHKR – was established on 1st August 2007 as a result of restructuring at the Faculty of Humanities, uniting four highly profiled, well established and related disciplines. The Department aims to maintain and strengthen these academic identities and create a basis for innovative interdisciplinary research and teaching. Seven cross-disciplinary research groups have been established at the department, and a wide range of studies and courses are taught. Centre for Early Sapiens Behaviour (SapienCE) is a new Centre of Excellence (CoE) located at the Department of Archaeology, History, Cultural Studies and Religion at the University of Bergen (UiB). SapienCE aims to consolidate UiB and Norway's position as a world leader in early human origins research.

Christopher Stuart Henshilwood 🇿🇦

Professor Christopher Henshilwood’s interests as an archaeologist, scientist, project leader and teacher encompass the development of complex technology, social systems, subsistence, environment, syntactic language and material culture associated with early Homo sapiens, especially those groups who evolved in southern Africa between 100,000 – 50,000 years ago. He has concentrated on finding archaeological sites that were occupied by H. sapiens during the Later- and Middle Stone Age and has excavated 20 of these sites in southern Africa. He currently leads research involving more than forty foremost scientists in diverse fields in Europe, Africa, the UK and USA. He holds a 5 year SARChI Research Chair in Origins of Human Behaviour (2017 – 2022) at Wits University, and is the Director of a 10 year Centre of Excellence, the Centre for Early Sapiens Behaviour (SapienCE) at the University of Bergen, Norway funded by the Research Council of Norway (2017-2026). A core focus of his projects is to encourage young researchers, especially women and the previously disadvantaged, in Africa and Europe. He has authored or co-authored more than 80 peer reviewed, wide-ranging papers on the origins of language and symbolism; the effects of climatic variation on human demographics, and on the theory of human behavioral evolution and published two books.