Biography

Paul Gerard Bahn, FSA (born 29 July 1953) is a British archaeologist, translator, writer and broadcaster who has published extensively on a range of archaeological topics, with particular attention to prehistoric art. He is a contributing editor to Archaeology magazine. With Colin Renfrew, he wrote the popular archaeology textbook Archaeology: Theories, Methods and Practice. Born and raised in Kingston-upon-Hull, Bahn was educated at the Marist College in the city and at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he studied archaeology and graduated with a BA in 1974. He completed his Ph.D thesis on the prehistory of the French Pyrenees at Cambridge in 1979. After receiving his doctorate, Bahn held several post-doctoral fellowships, at Liverpool and London, as well as a Getty Foundation postdoctoral fellowship in the History of Art and the Humanities. He went freelance in the mid-80s, and since then has devoted himself to writing, editing and translating books on archaeology, plus occasional journalism. His main research interest is prehistoric art, especially rock art of the world, and most notably Palaeolithic art, as well as the archaeology of Easter Island. He led the team which discovered the first Ice Age cave art in Britain in 2003 and 2004. He is a contributing editor to Archaeology magazine published by the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA), and has lectured on many archaeological study tours sponsored by the AIA and others across Europe, Africa, North America and Polynesia. Bahn has also been an active consultant expert to a number of archaeological documentaries, including the BBC production "The Making of Mankind" and the trilogy of programmes "Human Origins" for the Nova series produced by WGBH-TV, Boston. Bahn's 2012 memoir, The Cambridge Rapist - Unmasking The Beast of Bedsitland recalls his student days at a time when serial rapist Peter Samuel Cook was at large.