Oliver Gilkes
Consulting archaeologist, writer and educator
Oliver Gilkes is an archaeologist and researcher who has specialised in the Mediterranean. He worked as a museum curator and field archaeologist in the UK and taught at the University of East Anglia. Oliver has led archaeological projects in Italy, where he worked for the British School at Rome, and Albania at the Unesco World Heritage Site of Butrint and the Ottoman ‘stone city’ of Gjirokastra.
In Italy Oliver has worked on sites as diverse as the grounds of the British embassy, the pre-Roman city of Silvium in Puglia and in mountainous Molise the great Carolingian abbey of San Vincenzo al Volturno. In 1994 he and his colleagues crossed the Adriatic to post-communist Albania to begin a research and development project centred on the stunning site of Butrint on the Ionian Sea. There he organised the training programme, initiating hundreds of enthusiastic Albanian students into modern archaeology techniques.
Oliver continues to be involved in several research programmes in the Balkans and United Kingdom. He also has a busy programme of writing for popular scientific publications, plus finding time to squeeze in leading trips to some of Europe’s great archaeological sites.
