Richard Staff

Richard Staff, the project’s Chronology Modeller, is a leading expert in radiocarbon dating.

 

His achievements include researching the ages of early rock paintings in southern Africa, the world’s oldest non-hominin archaeology in Brazil, the domestication of wheat in Asia, early Buddhism in grottoes in China and human migration routes across the Bering Strait.

 

After a BA at Cambridge and an MSc at Royal Holloway, Richard’s DPhil at Oxford developed an improved way of carrying out the essential task of calibrating radiocarbon results.

 

This involved studying the ages of tree leaves found in the layers of sediment deposited every year at the bottom of Lake Suigetsu in Japan. By matching the leaves and sediments, Richard created an invaluable dataset that was featured in the journal Science and became central to international radiocarbon research.

 

This work on the lake’s annual layers of sediment, known as varves, in combination with reconstructions of the past environmental conditions at the site, has had a wide impact. It’s featured in Japanese high school textbooks and led to the establishment of a Varve Museum which has been visited by, among others, the Emperor of Japan.

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Richard’s skill at reaching back through the ages to provide accurate dating has earned him a nickname among his friends: Time Lord.