Gordon Hillman

Gordon Hillman
Gordon Hillman
Nationality	British
Fields	Archaeobotany
Institutions	University College London

Gordon Hillman is Honorary Visiting Professor in Archaeobotany (Palaeoethnobotany) at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London.

He has become well known on UK television via his work with Ray Mears on the BBC programme 'Wild Food' broadcast in 2007. His trademark Chinstrap Beard makes him particularly recognisable. In conjunction with Mears he has written a book to accompany the series also called 'Wild Food' and published by Hodder & Stoughton. Fundamentally the series and resultant book looked at strategies for the gathering, processing and storage of wild plants that were likely to have been available in aboriginal, (hunter-gatherer) Britain.

In both Britain and overseas, Hillman has made contributions to prehistoric archaeology, particularly in the area of the domestication of cereals, and in particular rye. His work in Turkey illuminated the ethnography of traditional cereal cultivation and grain processing, and this work, more than any other, has allowed the interpretation of ancient samples of charred grain (1981, 1984 below). Hillman has also published widely on the plant remains from Late Paleolithic Wadi Kubbaniya in Egypt (1989) and Tell Abu Hureyra in Syria (2000), where his work on environmental change and Mesolithic-Neolithic transition is frequently cited and where he is a co-author on numerous papers. He is known for his work the status of human domestication and cultivation of plants before the Neolithic agricultural revolution.

At UCL he held the post of Lecturer in Archaeobotany, then Reader, and is now Visiting Professor having retired early in 1997 on grounds of ill health. He suffers from Parkinson's disease.

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