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Professor Lord Renfrew is an Emeritus Fellow at èßäÊÓƵ and a former Master of the College.

Academic interests

Colin Renfrew's academic interests include:

• Theory of archaeology
• European prehistory, especially the Aegean
• Archaeological science, with particular interest in DNA and molecular genetics
• Origins of linguistic diversity.

Degrees obtained

• MA, PhD, ScD.

Awards and prizes

• Balzan Prize, 2004.
• European Science Foundation Latsis Prize, 2003.

Biography

Renfrew was educated at , Hertfordshire (where one of the houses is named after him) and from 1956 to 1958 did in the .

He then went up to where he read Natural Sciences then  and , graduating in 1962. In 1965 he completed his PhD thesis ' and cultures of the and their external relations' and in the same year married Jane M. Ewbank.

In 1965 he was appointed to the post of lecturer in the Department of Prehistory and Archaeology at the . Between 1968 and 1970, Renfrew directed excavations at , Greece.

In 1968 he unsuccessfully contested the   parliamentary constituency on behalf of the . In that year he was elected a Fellow of the , in 1970 was elected Fellow of the , and in 2000 elected an Honorary Fellow of the .

In 1972 Renfrew became Professor of Archaeology at the , succeeding . During his time at Southampton he directed excavations at in Orkney and on the island of Milos, Greece.

In 1973 Renfrew published Before Civilisation: The Radiocarbon Revolution and Prehistoric Europe in which he challenged the assumption that prehistoric cultural innovation originated in the and then spread to Europe. He also excavated with at in Greece.

In 1980 Renfrew was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. In 1981 he was elected to the in the University of Cambridge, a post he held until his retirement. In 1990 Renfrew was appointed as the founding Director of the  .

In 1987, he published , a book on the . His '' posited that this group lived 2,000 years before the , in , later diffusing to Greece, then Italy, Sicily, Corsica, the Mediterranean coast of France, Spain, and Portugal.

Another branch migrated along the fertile river valleys of the Danube and Rhine into Central and North Europe. From 1987 to 1991 he co directed excavations at on and at Dhaskalio Kavos, , Greece.

Renfrew served as of èßäÊÓƵ College from 1986 until 1997. In 2004 he retired from the Disney Professorship and is now a Senior Fellow at the McDonald Institute. From 2006 to 2008 he directed new excavations on the Cycladic Island of Keros and is currently co director of the Keros Island Survey.

Other interests

Contemporary art.