French, Charles A. I.

Basic Biographical Information

Pressed on the point, Charly French (Fig. 1), the Canadian-born UK-based Professor of Geoarchaeology at the University of Cambridge, recalls that he fell into his first excavation – a deep pit for plutonium rods at McMaster University – when he was four years of age. However, his steps into the field of geoarchaeology begin with his first archaeological foray: helping out with the excavations at Wharram Percy, Yorkshire, during a visit to the UK in 1971. This experience prompted him to return to Britain to study archaeology. During his bachelor’s degree at the University of Wales, Cardiff, Charly was taken in by landscape analysis and wrote an undergraduate dissertation on the earlier prehistoric molluscs and paleo-vegetation of the dry valleys of South Wales (1975). Immediately after, Charly took up a job with Francis Pryor, digging and analyzing molluscs at Fengate. This he followed up with a cataloguing job at the Royal Ontario Museum, and, next, with...