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

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.

Andy Needham

Andy is a Lecturer in Early Prehistory and experimental archaeology, and specialises in Early Prehistoric art.

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.

Kira Crabtree

Kira is a PhD student funded through NERC’s ACCE DTP. They are researching the mass properties of the heads of modern humans, fossil hominins, and different primate species.

Emily Mills

Emily is a PhD student researching how colonial narratives shape our understanding of the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition in Britain.

Chloe Parr

Chloe is a PhD student researching aggregation sites in the Upper Palaeolithic.

Julian Ziliang Zhang

Julian is a PhD student researching head mass distribution ontogeny in modern humans and redistribution evolution in hominins.

Zoe Fraser

Zoe is the Departmental Operations Manager and is supporting the conference logistics.

Vicky Moore

Vicky is the Departmental Finance Administrator and manages the conference budget.

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse