Career
He has been described as the "United Kingdom’s foremost archaeologist investigating our earliest ancestors."
Gamble"s first position was in 1975 as an Experimental Officer in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Southampton. He was appointed a Professor there in 1996. In 1999 he founded the Centre for the Archaeology of Human Origins at Southampton.
In 2004 Gamble was appointed to a Research Professorship in the Centre for Quaternary Research at Royal Holloway College, in the University of London.
He subsequently returned to Southampton as a Professor in the Department of Archaeology in 2011. In 2015 he was a Trustee of the British Museum.
Gamble"s main research interests are the archaeology of human origins, the social life of the earliest humans and the timing of their global colonisation. Gamble is a Trustee of the British Museum (August 2010-August 2014), Fellow of the British Academy, Fellow and Vice President of the Society of Antiquaries and Fellow and President of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
In 2002 he presented Where Do We Come From?, a six-part documentary screened on Channel Five.
Gamble is currently part of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation-sponsored team that is looking to date key evolutionary events in Europe over the last 60,000 years by dating deposits of volcanic ash. The events that the team is seeking to date includes the arrival of modern humans, the Neanderthal extinction, and the post-Ice Age re-colonisation of northern Europe approximately 16,000 years ago by the direct ancestors of most modern Europeans. Gamble was a co-director on the British Academy Centenary project (2003-2010) Lucy to language: The archaeology of the social brain
Gamble led a fieldwork programme in Greece, which recorded and published all the evidence from field surveys for Palaeolithic and Mesolithic settlement undertaken there in the last 50 years.
This led to the publication of The Prehistoric Stones of Greece which provided the first overview of all stone tools discovered in Greece.
There is no comparable overview elsewhere in Europe.
