Grahame Clark Medal
2025 winner: Professor Chantal Conneller
Professor Chantal Conneller is awarded the 2025 Grahame Clark Medal for her research which has transformed understanding of the Mesolithic period in the 21st century.
Chantal obtained her BA and PhD at Cambridge University; her summer fieldwork at this time took her to the Pennines where she discovered that Mesolithic archaeology is more interesting than most people think. Her PhD focused on Mesolithic and Upper Palaeolithic lithic assemblages of the Vale of Pickering, North Yorkshire, here she excavated with Tim Schadla-Hall for several years, subsequently directing excavations at Star Carr between 2004 and 2015 with Barry Taylor and Nicky Milner.
The Vale of Pickering work fostered her interest in long-term archaeological work on a landscape scale. For more than a decade she has collaborated with archaeologists and geoarchaeologists (Martin and Richard Bates, Ed Blinkhorn, Matt Pope, Beccy Scott, Andy Shaw), to excavate a series of Palaeolithic and Mesolithic sites on Jersey, exploring relationships between settlement, sea-level rise and environmental change.
Her latest landscape project sees a shift to sites in the Avebury region, working with Josh Pollard on the well-stratified site of Cherhill, amongst others and continuing a long-term interest in Mesolithic deposition practices.
Chantal has a variety of broader theoretical interests: these include the relationship between materials and technology (the subject of her book An Archaeology of Materials, 2011), and the relationship between bodies and material culture. This latter interest was the subject of a recent Leverhulme-funded project Unmasking Masks, with Ben Elliott, which explores the relationship between faces, bodies and masking technologies in mortuary contexts and visual culture. Her most recent book The Mesolithic in Britain (2021), completed thanks to a British Academy mid-career fellowship, drew on extensive archive work and radiocarbon audit to suggest a new chronological narrative for the British Mesolithic.
Chantal has worked at the Cambridge Archaeology Unit, Queens’ College, Cambridge, Bangor, Manchester and Newcastle Universities. She is currently Professor of Early Prehistory at Newcastle.
"I feel extremely honoured and rather overwhelmed to be awarded this prize, especially given the illustrious list of previous recipients, many of whose work and teaching have been an inspiration to me.
"Fittingly much of what has been accomplished is thanks to the British Academy who have supported me throughout my career: from PhD funding, small grant awards for excavations at Rookery Farm, Star Carr and Les Varines, and most recently a mid-career fellowship which enabled me to complete my book on the British Mesolithic and finally put to bed a project that spanned nearly a decade.
"I would also like to acknowledge my collaborators – academic, commercial and amateur alike - who have made archaeology so enjoyable and from whom I continue to learn a lot."
Chantal Conneller
Previous winners
History of the prize
This medal was endowed in 1992 by Professor Sir Grahame Clark (elected Fellow of the British Academy 1951; died 1995). The medal was awarded for the first time in 1993.