Vincent Gaffney

During the first decade of the 21st century Vince Gaffney was increasingly engaged within academic management.

Vincent Gaffney (born 25 February 1958) is a British archaeologist and the Anniversary Chair in Landscape Archaeology at the University of Bradford.

Gaffney has directed research projects around the world.

Most recently, he has become known for his work on Doggerland, a submerged landmass that existed in the North Sea in the early Holocene.

Other recent work includes the Anglo-Austrian “Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes Project", The Curious Travellers Project, the Adriatic islands Project, and the pit alignment at Warren Fields He was Co-PI on the EPSRC GG-TOP Gravity Gradient Project. Other fieldwork has included analysis of Roman villas on the Berkshire Downs (UK), survey at Roman Wroxeter, Diocletian's Palace, the Cetina Valley in Croatia, Forum Novum and Cyrene, Libya.

Born 25 February 1958 in Newcastle upon Tyne, Gaffney was educated at Westgate (Arthurs) Hill School and Rutherford Comprehensive School.

His interest in archaeology originated during his days at Westgate Hill Primary School in Newcastle upon Tyne: as part of an annual school trip, his class were taken to the Roman Wall, visiting sites such as the Mithraeum at Carrawbrughs and the forts at Chesters and Housesteads.

Encouraged by a grandfather with similar interests, he was fortunate enough to attend the Vindolanda excavations - sponsored by Rutherford Comprehensive - where he experienced archaeology first hand and met Robin and Anthony Birley on the site.

His brother Christopher Gaffney also became an archaeologist.

His undergraduate and postgraduate degrees were taken at the Department of Archaeology at the University of Reading.

Taking his first degree at the University of Reading, he studied with Richard Bradley, Michael Fulford and Robert Chapman and cut his archaeological teeth in field schools at sites including the Roman town at Silchester and the prehistoric enclosure at South Lodge.

In 1981 he returned to Berkshire to work on the Maddle Farm Project with Martin (Mog) Tingle.

The Maddle Farm Project was a survey aimed at studying the prehistoric and Roman settlement of the Berkshire Downs and gained some recognition for its detailed reconstruction of the economy of a single villa at Maddle Farm from the distribution of surface artefacts.

Following work at Maddle Farm, from 1983 Gaffney worked at Bordesley Abbey and at the Forge Mill Museum in Redditch.

In 1985 he decided to return to academic archaeology and to take a PhD, initially with John Bintliff and Božidar Slapšak.

Funded by the British Council, as a bilateral agreement with Yugoslavia, and then the British Academy, he intended to work on the hillfort at Rodik on the Slovenian karst.

As this was not possible he moved his research area to the island of Hvar and to work with Branko Kirigin and Nikša Vujnonović.

Together they surveyed the archaeological sites of the island and this work contributed to his PhD, submitted under Fulford at the University of Reading.

The development of Gaffney's PhD into a larger project was delayed by the fragmentation of Yugoslavia and the war leading to the independence of Croatia.

However, during this period, the Eastern Hvar survey, led by Tim Kaiser, Branko Kirigin and John Hayes, was reformulated into the Adriatic Islands Project in 1991/2.

The project aimed to study settlement associated with the peculiar arrangement of the coastline in central Dalmatia.

Here, the myriad of small islands and good harbours provided numerous opportunities for interaction and the region has easy access south to Greece, north to the Po valley.

The string of islands also enables "line of sight" travel from the Balkan coast to Italy.

His PhD at Reading was on the archaeology of the island of Hvar in Croatia, and was titled "Aspects of the archaeology of Hvar" (1992).

Having spent some time working with Julian Richards on his Berkshire Barrows Project, Gaffney followed Julian after graduation to the newly formed Wessex Archaeology Unit to work on the Stonehenge Environs Project.

In 1992, Gaffney was employed at the University of Birmingham, rising from a research fellow at the Birmingham University Field Archaeology Unit (BUFAU) – later Birmingham Archaeology.

During this time, he established archaeological computing, in academic terms, at the department.

Despite the war, the Adriatic Island Project continued to operate through to 1996 and surveyed archaeological sites across Brač (with Zoran Stančič), Šolta, Vis, Palagruža and many smaller islands.

The results demonstrated the role of long-distance contacts in settlement development, plus the nature of direct intervention and colonisation, either by expansive local groups or major colonial powers including Greek city states or Rome.

The project undertook excavations at Grabčeva Špilja, the Greek colony at Pharos, Krajcina Spilja and the hilltop enclosure at Škrip.

It was during this project that Gaffney was attracted to the use of geographic information systems (GIS) for archaeological analysis.

After working for a brief time with Fred Limp and Ishmael Williams at the Arkansas Archaeological Survey, later CAST, he and Zoran Stančič, then a PhD student at Ljubljana, published one of the first extensive archaeological publicationsin Europe using GIS and data from the island of Hvar.

In 1996 he received funding from the Leverhulme Trust to study the Roman town at Wroxeter, Viriconium Cornoviorum.

As part of a team with Simon Buteux, Roger White, Martin van Leusen and Christopher Gaffney, the Wroxeter Hinterland Project undertook the first complete geophysical survey of a complete Roman Town in Britain, in collaboration with researchers from across the world.

The University of Birmingham was awarded the Queen's Anniversary Prize in 1996 for this research.

At the end of the 90s, Gaffney, with Ron Yorston, Ann Woodward and Sally Exon, undertook the Stonehenge Landscapes Project using java-applets to explore the GIS data from a major digital landscape study of the Stonehenge Landscape, incorporating tens of thousands of GIS viewsheds as part of the interactive publication.

Between 2002 and 2015 he founded, and was Director of, a larger academic grouping entitled the Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity (now the Department of Classics, Ancient History and Archaeology).

After initially taking a part-time lectureship in the Department of Ancient History and Archaeology at Birmingham, he was given a Chair in Landscape Archaeology and Geomatics in 2004.

Between 2008-11, he was Director of Research and Knowledge Transfer within the newly formed College of Arts and Law at the University of Birmingham.

Recognising the increasing significance of visualisation within the Humanities as well as science, he, with Paul Hatton and Glynn Barratt, founded the Visual and Spatial Technology Centre (VISTA) at Birmingham.