Below are the three individuals nominated for 2026’s ‘Archaeologist of the Year’, whose achievements reflect the diverse work taking place within our field.
Voting is now open, and all the winners of the Current Archaeology Awards will be announced on 28th February 2026 as part of Current Archaeology Live! 2026. Click here to find out more about the event.
Find out more about the awards here.
Sponsor of Archaeologist of the Year 2026
Dr Jane Kershaw
Jane is the first Gad Rausing Associate Professor of Viking Age Archaeology at the University of Oxford. Her research harnesses large-scale public-finds datasets, and analyses them in new, scientific ways to change the way that we think about the early medieval world. This has led to profound new insights, often challenging existing, text-based narratives – for instance, that substantial numbers of women from Scandinavia settled in the Danelaw, that the Viking expansion out of Scandinavia was geared towards the east rather than west, and that the first post-Roman coins in northern Europe were minted from reserves of Byzantine plate, rather than from new metal. Jane has conducted fieldwork in the UK and Scandinavia, and currently co-runs, with Dr Jane Harrison, excavations of an early medieval settlement and Viking winter camp at East Thirston, Northumberland. Her work has been incorporated into several exhibitions, including the British Museum’s Silk Roads and the National Museum of Scotland’s Galloway Hoard.
Dr Kris Lockyear
Following a junior school visit to Verulamium in 1975, Kris became a member of the Welwyn Archaeological Society, aged just 11. He first excavated with WAS at Easter 1976, then with Martin Biddle at St Albans Abbey in 1978. By senior school he was spending his school holidays digging with Phil Barker at Wroxeter, which he did every year from 1980–1985. After earning Archaeology degrees from Durham, Southampton, and UCL, interspersed with working in commercial archaeology, in 1996 Kris joined the academic staff at the Institute of Archaeology, UCL, where he is now a Senior Lecturer.
Kris has a long-time interest in archaeological geophysics. He undertook Earth Resistance surveys for his undergraduate dissertation in 1986, then renewed his interest when he started teaching. Since attending the US National Park Service’s course on geophysics in 2005, geophysical survey has become a significant focus of his activities. In 2006, he was invited back as a tutor on that course, a role he played for almost 20 years. Kris became director of WAS in 2009, and in 2013 established the Community Archaeology Geophysics Group, a group of dedicated volunteers who have surveyed over 70 sites across SE England, including the entirety of Verulamium, for which they — not Kris, he wants to emphasise! — won the prestigious Britannia award. They have surveyed a wide variety of sites, from a Neolithic long barrow to a 19th-century stately home, mainly in the south-east of England. Kris has been a passionate supporter of community archaeology for his whole career, delivering lectures, training, and fieldwork opportunities whenever he can.
Dr David Neal
David is a leading expert on Romano-British mosaics, and an archaeological illustrator, excavator, and author of key works on Roman and medieval mosaics. He has documented every Romano-British mosaic discovery since 1960, more recently working with Stephen Cosh, with whom he produced the five-volume corpus of Roman Mosaics of Britain. David published his first mosaic as a teenager during Sheppard Frere’s Verulamium excavations, and went on to lead the Inspectorate of Ancient Monuments’ illustration team before joining the Central Excavation Unit as an archaeologist (he has since passed on most his collection of mosaic paintings to the British Museum). He has directed significant excavations including the Roman villas at Gadebridge Park, Gorhambury, Boxmoor, and Stanwick.
