Paul Mellars

Early life and academic career

Paul Anthony Mellars was born on 29 October 1939 in the village of Swallownest, near Sheffield. His father, Herbert Mellars, was a miner and a member of the Plymouth Brethren. From the village school, he progressed to Woodhouse, a County Council Grammar School founded in 1909 in the West Riding of Yorkshire, which his mother Elaine (née Batty) had also attended. (Woodhouse has subsequently been incorporated into the newly built Aston Academy in Swallownest.) Mellars obtained his MA, PhD and ScD degrees at the University of Cambridge, where he was a student at Fitzwilliam College. He married his wife Anny in 1969, having first met in an archaeological field trip in the Dordogne in 1964.

After his PhD, Mellars taught for ten years in the Archaeology Department at Sheffield University before returning to Cambridge in 1980, where he became a fellow of Corpus Christi College. He briefly served as acting master of the college in 2007, following the resignation of Sir Alan Wilson, but six months later lost the election to become the formal successor to Wilson to Oliver Rackham. He has held visiting positions at the Binghamton University and the Australian National University.

He served as president of the Prehistoric Society. He was also a trustee of the ACE Foundation.