Updates Archive

23rd May 2024

Geoff Bailey travelled to Riyadh in early May to sign a new five-year Scientific Cooperation Agreement with the Saudi Heritage Commission.

5th June 2020

A new analysis of size variation in Conomurex fasciatus shells from the Farasan Islands has recently been published.

21st June 2019

A new analysis of the spatial and temporal distribution of the Farasan shell mounds demonstrates major differences in rates of shell accumulation as a function of distance to the shoreline.

7th December 2017

Antiquity journal has just published the first results of the Wadi Dabsa site, one of the largest concentrations of Palaeolithic material discovered during the DISPERSE surveys in SW Arabia

12th November 2017

The First Saudi Archaeology Convention took place at the National Museum in Riyadh from 7-9 November.

24th October 2016

Two new DISPERSE papers on the coastal ecology of the Farasan Islands have recently been published

20th October 2016

The latest results of DISPERSE research in the Kenya Rift have just been published in Open Quaternary

19th October 2016

Members of DISPERSE took part in a workshop on the

4th September 2016

Geoffrey King delivered the Alexander von Humboldt lecture at the headquarters of the Carl Freidrich von Siemens Foundation in Munich on 7th June 2016.

9th May 2016

Geoff Bailey spent 6 weeks in New Zealand and Australia to lecture about the DISPERSE project and gain a comparative southern hemisphere perspective on the role of coastal, tectonic and volcanic landscapes in patterns of human dispersal.

4th March 2016

Members of DISPERSE made a number of presentations at the Jeddah Workshop held between 14th and 18th February.

2nd March 2016

Geoffrey King led a field trip to Kenya and Tanzania from 4th to 24th February with Simon Kuebler and Stephen Rucina to extend field mapping of edaphic and tectonic features in the Rift

22nd January 2016

Geoff Bailey was in Athens from 13–16 January to give a public lecture and to discuss DISPERSE research results on the southern Red Sea with members of HCMR .

20th January 2016

As the DISPERSE project draws towards its formal end (31 March 2016), and members of the team reach the end of their research contracts, they are dispersing to new positions around the globe.

6th January 2016

Two new publications are now available: in Quaternary International by Niklas Hausmann et al.: and in Journal of Human Evolution by Isabelle Winder et al.

27th November 2015

Anthony Sinclair and Andy Shuttleworth visited the National Museum Riyadh from 30th October to 13th November and successfully completed study of the material recovered from the January 2015 survey,

29th October 2015

Geoffrey King led new fieldwork to examine soil edaphics and tectonics in the Kenyan and Tanzanian Rift between 13th and 30th September.

23rd October 2015

Robyn Inglis attended the 2015 meeting of the INQUA-funded MedFLOOD Project, held in Istria, 15-19th October.

17th October 2015

It is with great regret that we report the death of Peter Owenga Kwengu

28th September 2015

New papers published in Nature Scientific Reports, Quaternary International, Evolutionary Anthropology, Internet Archaeology, Comptes Rendus Geoscience

11th September 2015

Isabelle Winder was recently asked by a popular radio programme on science to answer their question of the week.

7th September 2015

Geoff Bailey, Robyn Inglis and Garry Momber all participated in this year's meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists, held in Glasgow from 2nd–5th September.

25th August 2015

Geoff Bailey has been awarded a Hood Fellowship to work at the University of Auckland in New Zealand in 2016

21st August 2015

Niklas Hausmann successfully passed his PhD viva examination, which took place last Wednesday, 12th August, and is seen here at King’s Manor shortly after the viva.

7th August 2015

Robyn Inglis and Niklas Hausmann presented their DISPERSE Research at the XIX INQUA congress in Nagoya, Japan from 27th July to 2nd August 2015.

26th July 2015

Geoff Bailey and Geoffrey King both gave invited presentations at the international ROCEEH conference on human expansions, held at the Senckenburg Museum in Frankfurt am Main from 13–17th July.

6th July 2015

Geoffrey King gave an invited talk at the 31st meeting of the IAS, held at Krakow from 22nd to 25th June, 2015.

4th June 2015

Geoffrey King has recently been awarded a Carl Friedrich von Siemens Research Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

13th May 2015

Three new papers have recently been published by project members: Landscape Structures and Human Evolutionary Ecology in Africa; Blue Arabia; and The Evolution of the Red Sea as a Human Habitat.

24th April 2015

Robyn Inglis presented research on the Palaeolithic of the Harrat Al Birk, SW Saudi Arabia at the Unravelling the Palaeolithic 2015 conference in Oxford, UK, in April.

11th March 2015

Matt and Robyn have both been successful in winning International Fellowships funded by EU Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions to work, respectively, in New Zealand and Australia.

2nd February 2015

Members of DISPERSE held a working meeting at the Ludwig Maximilians University Department of Earth and Environmental Science on 29–30 January, 2015.

29th January 2015

Robyn Inglis led a highly successful three weeks of geoarchaeological survey in the Harrat Al Birk, Asir province, southwest Saudi Arabia.

26th January 2015

A new paper by Isabelle Winder has been published in the journal Folia Primatologica.

13th December 2014

Robyn Inglis presented ongoing research on the Palaeolithic of SW Saudi Arabia at the 'Middle Palaeolithic in the Desert II' conference in Bordeaux, France, 11-13th December.

10th December 2014

Geoff Bailey gave a lecture at the headquarters of the Saudi Geological Survey in Jeddah on 10 December.

10th December 2014

Geoff Bailey and Robyn Inglis spent 10 days in the field between 28 November and 6 December with Bill Bosworth from Apache Egypt and a team from the Saudi Geological Survey led by Najeeb Rasul.

14th November 2014

DISPERSE members held a two-day workshop at the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research (HCMR) on the 11-12 November to discuss current results and future plans with particular focus on the Red Sea.

3rd November 2014

The European Marine Board has published the report of the SUBLAND Working Group 'Land beneath the Waves: Submerged Landscapes and Sea Level Change: a joint geoscience-humanities strategy'

25th October 2014

Robyn Inglis and Matt Meredith-Williams joined the MEDFLOOD 2014 field workshop to discuss sea level change in the Eastern Mediterranean and its impact on past societies.

24th October 2014

Niklas Hausmann recently presented his research on the Farasan Islands at the 12th International Conference of the International Council for Archaeozoology (ICAZ) in San Rafael, Argentina.

13th October 2014

Between 1 and 26 September, Geoffrey King continued work with other members of DISPERSE on the tectonic geomorphology and edaphics of the Kenyan Rift, following up the work begun last year.

27th September 2014

Robyn Inglis and Matt Meredith-Williams took part in York's contribution to European Researchers' Night, showcasing the impact of research in more than 300 cities in 28 countries on one night.

12th September 2014

Niklas Hausmann attended this meeting on 27–30 August and presented a poster on new laser techniques of palaeoclimatic analysis.

18th July 2014

The York-Paris core team held a working meeting at King’s Manor, York, on 17–18 July.

15th July 2014

A new paper by Robyn Inglis et al. has been published in the Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 2013.

15th July 2014

Devès et al. 'Hominin reactions to herbivore distribution in the Lower Palaeolithic of the southern Levant' now published.

25th May 2014

Geoff Bailey gave a lecture on the recent work of the DISPERSE project in SW Saudi Arabia at a meeting of European and Saudi archaeologists and scientists engaged in international collaboration

17th May 2014

On May 2nd 2014 Simon Kübler presented first results of the ongoing research on edaphics and tectonics of the Kenya Rift at the European Geoscience Union (EGU) general assembly in Vienna, Austria.

6th May 2014

Robyn Inglis visited the Scottish Universities' Environmental Research Centre in East Kilbride on the 1st May 2014 to deliver a research seminar.

7th April 2014

Geoff Bailey, Maud Devès and Robyn Inglis attended the Green Arabia conference in Oxford on 2–4 April

28th March 2014

Geoff Bailey and Robyn Inglis gave a joint Evolutionary Anthropology Seminar at the University of Liverpool on the 27th March 2014.

20th March 2014

Garry Momber led new diving work on the Farasan Islands with a team of archaeological divers from the Maritime Archaeology Trust, Southampton and the Saudi Commission for Tourism and Antiquities.

6th March 2014

Robyn Inglis and Anthony Sinclair, leading an international DISPERSE team, have completed a highly successful two month-long campaign of field research and analysis in the Jizan and Asir regions of

15th September 2013

Geoffrey King spent a three-week field season in Kenya with Simon Kübler, Stephen Rucina from the National Museums of Kenya, and Peter Owenga from the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute.

3rd July 2013

Research by DISPERSE project members Robyn Inglis, Matt Meredith-Williams and Niklas Hausmann featured prominently in the Department of Archaeology's contribution to the RAEng's Summer Exhibition.

1st July 2013

The first peer-reviewed journal paper of the DISPERSE Project has been published (DISPERSE Contribution no. 0001), proposing a new hypothesis for the evolution of bipedalism

27th June 2013

The R/V AEGAEO (Hellenic Centre for Marine Research) successfully completed an underwater survey in the Red Sea between 29 May and 13 June.

7th May 2013

Isabelle Winder presented a paper at the 78th meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in Honolulu on 6 April on behalf of members of the DISPERSE team

15th March 2013

During February, DISPERSE team members Robyn Inglis, Abdullah Alsharekh, Anthony Sinclair and Andy Shuttleworth carried out extensive new field survey in the Jizan and Asir provinces.

10th March 2013

Members of the DISPERSE team undertook a major campaign of shell mound excavation and sampling on the Farasan Islands between 20 January and 2 March.

29th December 2012

Geoff Bailey visited the Republic of China between 10 and 16 December to deliver the Fu Ssu-nien Memorial Lectures on The Archaeology of Ancient Coastlines

16th December 2012

Isabelle Winder has successfully passed her PhD viva examination, which took place last Monday, 10th December.

5th December 2012

Geoff Bailey, Robyn Inglis, Matt Meredith-Williams and Niklas Hausmann carried out new fieldwork and reconnaissance on the Farasan Islands and the Jizan mainland In November.

28th September 2012

Geoff Bailey and Matt Meredith-Williams took part in excavations on the Weipa shell mounds on the west coast of the Cape York Peninsula in northern Queensland between 21 August and 12 September.

23rd September 2012

Geoff Bailey co-organised a session on Geology and Archaeology: Submerged Landscapes of the Continental Shelf at the 34th International Geological Congress in Brisbane, Australia.

25th July 2012

Maud Devès, Robyn Inglis, Matt Meredith-Williams and Saud Al Ghamdi made a first reconnaissance of Palaeolithic landscapes in SW Saudi Arabia.

18th March 2012

Geoffrey King and Geoff Bailey made a first visit to the Kenyan Rift between 11 February and 6 March.

3rd February 2012

Geoff Bailey visited the HCMR to discuss with the Director Costas Synolakis and Dimitris Sakellariou plans for the use of the R/V AEGAEO in the Red Sea

18th December 2011

Geoff Bailey gave an opening lecture at a UNESCO Scientific Colloquium on the Factors impacting Underwater Cultural Heritage, held at the Royal Library of Belgium in Brussels on the 13–14 December

24th September 2011

Geoff Bailey was in Riyadh this month with Abdullah Alsharekh to sign a new 5-year agreement with the SCTA for joint Saudi-UK archaeological fieldwork

21st September 2011

Geoff Bailey and Abdullah Alsharekh visited the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology on 11 September.

30th June 2011

Geoff Bailey gave a lecture on 24 June at the HCMR in Athens.

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