Roderick McIntosh

Roderick James McIntosh, Ph.D., University of Cambridge, is the Clayton Stephenson Emeritus Professor of Anthropology and Curator of Anthropology at the Peabody Museum at Yale and is honorary distinguished professor of archaeology at the University of Pretoria. His major interests are in African and Old World comparative prehistory, intellectual history of prehistoric archaeology, ethnicity and specialization and the origin of authority in complex society, urbanism, geomorphology and paleoclimate, international art market, and prehistoric symbols and ideology. He was involved in the birthing of the first bilateral accord banning the import of antiquities into a “market” nation (U.S.) from a “source” nation (Mali). For the past thirty-five years he has made comparative studies of the urban landscapes of the great Niger and Senegal floodplains, including co-directorship of investigations at Jenne-jeno, sub-Saharan Africa’s oldest city.

Professor McIntosh’s future fieldwork will concern the paleoclimate, floodplain dynamics, and rise and fall of cities in the now “dead” delta of the Niger, the Méma of Mali. He also plans to take samples for archaeomagnetism dating from Peru, South Africa, and (continuing) from Senegal and Mali. These samples are for his new archaeomagnetism dating laboratory, with the capacity for high-resolution dating from archaeological contexts and to provide magnetic intensity data to field models of the changing intensity of the earth’s magnetic field. Professor McIntosh has been a Guggenheim Fellow, twice a Fulbright Senior Fellow (Senegal and Mali), and has held a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.