Ballot Archive

27 Jun 2024

Candidate Details

Candidate Name

Sam Challis

Academic degrees, honours etc.

DPhil archaeology (oxon 2008) and MSt. world archaeology (oxon 2003) BA Hons (dunelm 1996)

Profession or occupation

Archaeologist

Grounds for election

Sam Challis is Head of the Rock Art Research Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He has 35 peer-reviewed articles, an h-index of 19, three books and edited volumes and 1151 citations. He specialises in global rock art with a focus on interaction between African hunter-gatherers, pastoralists and farmers, as well as European colonists, and the 'reverse gaze' that rock art offers from the Indigenous perspective. Equally, he is engaged in a New Animisms approach to Indigenous rock art and forager navigation of the landscape. Framing rock art as Indigenous archive is central to all his work, and his recent publication in Current Anthropology is an example of this. His research programme in the Eastern Cape aims to redress the imbalance of history in the former-apartheid region while training local community members to record and preserve rock art. In 2020, he was elected to the prestigious Bradshaw Foundation Rock Art Network (Los Angeles, USA).

Signatories

The following Fellows have signed this Blue Paper