Smithsonian Journeys Experts

Mike Parker Pearson is Professor of British Later Prehistory at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London (UCL) and a Fellow of the British Academy. He has worked on archaeological sites around the world in Britain, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Syria, the United States, Madagascar and Rapa Nui (Easter Island). He has published 23 books and over 200 research publications on a wide variety of archaeological topics. He has been leading a research project on Stonehenge since 2003 along with other projects on isotopic analysis of people and livestock at the time of Stonehenge. Most recently he has been excavating in the Preseli hills of Wales where some of Stonehenge’s stones were quarried. His fascination with megaliths has taken him to many parts of the world to find out how and why they were erected.