Matthew Robert Bennett

Matthew R. Bennett is Professor of Archaeology at the University of Reading and Emeritus Professor at Bournemouth University. A geographer and geomorphologist by training, his passion for landscapes began during a childhood spent exploring the mountains of Snowdonia (Eryri) in North Wales.

His early research focused on glaciers, Quaternary environments and landscape change, with fieldwork ranging from the British Isles to the Arctic and Mexico. Over the past two decades his research has increasingly focused on fossil human footprints and what they can reveal about human evolution, behaviour and movement through ancient landscapes.

In 2009, his work on 1.5-million-year-old hominin footprints at Ileret, Kenya, was published in Science. Since then, he has worked on footprint sites across Africa, Europe and North America. He is particularly known for his research at White Sands National Park in New Mexico, where human footprints dated to between approximately 23,000 and 21,000 years ago have transformed debate about the timing of the first peopling of the Americas.

His research combines field geology, archaeology, 3D imaging and computational approaches, including agent-based modelling, to explore both past human behaviour and the processes that determine what survives in the geological record.

Matthew has published more than 150 scientific papers as well as textbooks and books for wider audiences. His most recent book, Those Who Walked Before Us, tells the story of the White Sands footprints and what they reveal about the first Americans. He is currently working on new books about fossil footprints, Ice Age landscapes and the ways in which geology has shaped Britain.

Before becoming Emeritus Professor, Matthew held a number of senior roles at Bournemouth University, including Dean and Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research and Internationalisation. He now divides his time between research and writing, with a particular interest in using footprints to recover fleeting moments of human behaviour from deep time.