Peter Woodman

Peter Woodman FSA MRIA (2 July 1943 – 24 January 2017)^[1] was an Irish archaeologist specialising in the Mesolithic period in Ireland. He was a professor emeritus at University College Cork and a former keeper of the Ulster Museum.

Education and career

Woodman grew up in Holywood, County Down^[1] and studied archaeology at Queen's University Belfast.^[2] After obtaining his doctorate, he became the Assistant Keeper of Prehistoric Antiquities at the Ulster Museum.^[1][2] In the 1970s he excavated Mesolithic sites at Mount Sandel, the oldest known site of human occupation in Ireland,^[2][3][4] and Newferry in County Antrim.^[2][5]

He became a professor at University College Cork in 1983,^[1] where he continued his research into the Mesolithic period, discovering some of the first evidence of the Mesolithic from the Republic of Ireland at Ferriter’s Cove on the Dingle Peninsula.^[1][6] After retiring, he published Ireland’s First Settlers: Time and the Mesolithic, bringing together fifty years of research into the Irish Mesolithic.^[1][7]

Woodman was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1982.^[1] He was awarded the Europa Prize by the Prehistoric Society in 2009, recognising outstanding contributions to the study of European prehistory.^[8] In the same year, the Prehistoric Society organised a conference and published a festschrift in his honour.^[9] Following Woodman's death in January 2017, James Mallory described him as QUB's "most illustrious archaeology graduate", whose work provided the "basic structure of all subsequent research into the Irish Mesolithic".^[1]

References