About us
The Unravelling the Palaeolithic (UTP) conference is a student-led symposium that is aimed at bringing together human origins researchers and institutions from across the world. UTP was inaugurated on the 28-29th of January 2011, to celebrate ten years of Centre for the Archaeology of Human Archaeology (CAHO) research at Southampton. After the success of its first year, it was proposed to make the conference an annual event, hosted in turn by Southampton and five other universities (Liverpool, Cambridge, Durham, Oxford, and York). After a brief hiatus due to COVID the relaunch of the UTP conference series took place at Southampton in Spring 2023. The relaunch was a huge success with delegates presenting from across the world, both in-person and online and the list of host institutions was expanded to include UCL.
York will host the UTP conference in 2024.
To learn more about past conferences, click here.
UTP 2024 Organising committee
Andy Needham
Andy is a Lecturer in Early Prehistory and experimental archaeology, and specialises in Early Prehistoric art.
Steph Piper
Steph is a Lecturer in archaeology and is a Mesolithic and lithic specialist. Her research interests are hunter-gatherer coastal and island occupation and the archaeology of Scotland.
Jess Bates
Jess is a Postdoctoral Research Associate working on archiving Flixton Island 2, an Upper Palaeolithic to Early Mesolithic site in North Yorkshire.
Annabell Zander
Annabell is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow. Her project is titled Exploring human-environment interactions across the Pleistocene-Holocene transition in northwestern Europe.
Zoe Fraser
Zoe is the Departmental Operations Manager and is supporting the conference logistics.