DrMark Haughton

I am a prehistoric archaeologist with broad interests in the social lives of people in later prehistoric Europe. 

My current project 'The Wool Age: rethinking social life in later prehistoric Europe', funded by the European Commission, is an attempt to understand how the arrival of wool transformed people's lives, focusing on their relationships with sheep and with one another. Specifically, I am working to identify the earliest arrival of wool in Britain, and to understand if and why it was adopted so much later than in Continental Europe. It is easy to forget how important woolly sheep would have been to people in prehistory, but this new material would have provided new ways of dressing, with the ability to withstand cold and wet far better than the available alternatives. It quickly became a way of expressing gender identity and allegiance in Bronze Age Denmark, yet both the timing of its arrival in Britain and its effects on society are unknown. 

My previous research has focused on the development of gender ideals in Bronze Age Europe, challenging the idea that the Bronze Age brought stable, binary understandings of gender by analysing the evidence for variation, difference and debate in communities in Ireland and Scotland. My first book 'Gender and Society on the Margins of Bronze Age Europe' has just been published by Routledge. After this, I worked with Mette Løvschal and her team at Aarhus University in Denmark to understand how people created new landscapes with animals, plants and ancestors in the prehistoric heathlands of Northern Europe. Key work from this project has appeared in the journals 'Antiquity' and the 'Journal of Anthropological Archaeology'.