Dr Peter Tomkins

Peter fell in love with Crete in 1991 on a gap year spent travelling in Greece. Arriving on the island for a planned two-week visit, he was still there three months later pushing a wheel-barrow for the British School excavations at the Bronze Age town of Palaikastro in East Crete. After reading Classics at Oxford, the call of Cretan prehistory became too great to ignore and, after an MA in Archaeology at University College London, there followed a PhD thesis on the Cretan Neolithic at the University of Sheffield. Since then, he has held a series of research and teaching posts at universities and research institutions in the U.K., Belgium, Greece and Italy. He is a specialist on the Neolithic and Bronze Age of the Aegean with a focus on Crete, where he has been involved in the study of many sites around the island, most notably the site of Knossos. Currently a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Catania, Peter is writing a monograph on Neolithic Knossos, where he also co-directs a team of specialists preparing the publication of the Neolithic excavations.