John McNabb - Facilities and Staff

We've got a lot of facilities. The archeology department is in a brand new building. Everything is right up to the minute, state of the art.

We have laboratories for ceramic analysis, thin sectioning, [plume] covers, and things like that. We have a laboratory for looking at various kinds of animal bones, along with a separate lodging for human bones and research rooms for different aspects of formal studies.

There are rooms, such as this one, that we're in now, which is dedicated to the human origin aspects, where we keep our caste collections for skulls of human ancestors, but also for teaching collections.

There are a lot of other material that we can use for surveying. We have state of the art laboratories for the computing side, where the GIS requirements have the most up-to-date machines, with the biggest memory for computer processing.

I don't understand a lot of this computing stuff, but we've got four specialists in that area to teach on the postgraduate courses. They've got everything that you would need to produce some of the most exciting graphics and some of the most exciting GIS work that you can think of.

All the teaching staff are research active. As I said, we are a large department, and we're into 15 to 20 proper research staff, double figures, who are teaching.

We cover everything, for myself, looking at human origins, two-million-years ago. We can move through specialists, who are looking at the first modern humans. There are specialists who are beginning to think about the neolithic, early farming, and first arrival of neolithic people in Britain.

There are other later neolithic specialists, who either look at work in Britain or abroad. We have people who do the bronze age, the iron age, and we're into some big Roman programs with some very exciting research work being done in Rome, itself, at the moment.

Into the later periods, we have some anglo saxon specialists who teach with us, through and into the later medieval period. We have people as far flung as Afghanistan looking at Islamic archeology. It's a very wide range, as you would expect from such a big department with such a diverse set of interests.