Lyn Wadley

Lyn Wadley is an honorary professor of archaeology, and also affiliated jointly with the Archaeology Department and the Institute for Evolution at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. Wadley received her master's degree from the University of Cape Town in 1977, and her PhD from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1986. Wadley taught in the School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies and the Evolutionary Studies Institute, University of the Witwatersrand from 1982 to 2004. Wadley began her career researching social and ecological issues in the Later Stone Age in South Africa. This included the first considerations of gender in the archaeological record of Southern Africa, as articulated by Mazel "this has firmly placed the study of gender on the South African archaeological map". She directed excavations at multiple Holocene sites in Magaliesberg and then began working on older, Pleistocene sites. Professor Wadley spent eleven years excavating the Rose Cottage Cave in the Eastern Free State. From 1998-2011, her excavations at Sibudu Rock Shelter in KwaZulu-Natal led to a series of insights and publications about early human cognitive ability. Wadley has claimed that the relationship between the use of compound adhesives and compound paints is clear evidence for modern thought processes, including multi-tasking, found in South Africa 100,000 years ago. Although she retired from the university, she still supervises Ph.D students. She has led an archaeologist team at the Sibudu rock shelter in KwaZulu-Natal, and has uncovered new evidence for early humans' cognitive ability. She is listed on the Thomson Reuters list of highly cited researchers. In July 2019 she was elected as Fellow of the British Academy. In her Ph.D research she developed a model of the social organisation of Holocene Later Stone Age hunter-gatherers focussing on seasonal aggregation and dispersal of groups. By excavations she identified a possible aggregation site, Jubilee shelter, and a possible dispersal site, Cave James.