Rate My Professor Christopher Henshilwood

Christopher Henshilwood completed a BA with distinction in Archaeology from the University of Cape Town in 1989 and a BA Hons with distinction from the same institution in 1990. He earned a PhD in Archaeology from the University of Cambridge in 1995, with a thesis on the Holocene archaeology of the coastal Garcia State Forest in the southern Cape, South Africa. He held a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Cape Town from 1996 to 1997 and served as a researcher in the Department of Archaeology there from 1997 to 2002.

His research focuses on the Middle Stone Age and the origins of modern human behaviour, with extensive excavations at Blombos Cave yielding evidence of early symbolic behaviour, including engraved ochre pieces, bone tools, shell beads, and an ochre-processing workshop. Key publications include the 2002 Science paper on Middle Stone Age engravings from South Africa, the 2004 Science paper on shell beads, and the 2011 Science paper on a 100,000-year-old ochre-processing workshop at Blombos Cave. He has held professorial positions at the University of Bergen as Professor of African Prehistory and at the University of the Witwatersrand as Professor and SARChI Chair in the Origins of Modern Human Behaviour, where he directs the Centre for Early Sapiens Behaviour (SapienCE). He was ranked among the top ten of South Africa’s most influential scientific minds for 2002–2012 and has received recognition including mention in a South African parliamentary address.

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