Prof. Dr. Patrick Roberts

Patrick Roberts received a BA in Archaeology and Anthropology, an MSc in Archaeological Science, and DPhil in Archaeological Science at the University of Oxford. Between 2016 and 2022 he was Group Leader and then W2 Scientist of the Department of Archaeology at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. Since 2022 he was the W2 Independent Research Group Leader of the isoTROPIC Research Group at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology and Lead Scientist of the Department of Archaeology. He also holds an Honorary Professorship at the Australian National University and Visiting Professorship at the University of the Philippines.

As Director of the Department of Coevolution of Land Use and Urbanisation (since January 2025), Patrick is committed to pioneering and applying multidisciplinary approaches to studying long-term relationships of our species and the Earth system. In particular, he focuses on developing new methodologies and datasets which can be used to study how urban dynamics, trajectories, and networks (and their alternatives) have interacted with land use changes and, in turn, different parts of the Earth system across space and time. This includes combining state-of-the-art approaches in field- and lab-based archaeological science, remote sensing, palaeoecology, history, computational archaeology, and land use modelling.

In 2021, Patrick was awarded the Heinz Maier Leibniz Prize, the top award for early career investigators in Germany and the first time that it has been awarded to an archaeologist. In 2024, he received the Thuringian Research Prize from the Thuringian Ministry of Economics, Science, and Digital Society for fundamental research. This built on his ERC Starter Grant PANTROPOCENE: Finding a Pre-industrial Pan-tropical ‘Anthropocene’. Patrick has also been a member of the Global Young Academy and the Young Academy of Europe and is a National Geographic Explorer.

Patrick is committed to ensuring that his research makes contributions to local stakeholders in the regions where he works and engages closely with Indigenous communities, being awarded the Humanitarian Award of the Veddah Indigenous Community of Sri Lanka in 2023. He also seeks to engage with policy makers and is a member of the iHOPE network and has served onUNESCO panels relating to natural and cultural heritage designations. As part of his aims to make his work accessible to the public, Patrick also wrote the popular book ‘Jungle: How Tropical Forests Shaped the World and Us’ published by Penguin/Viking Random House in 2021.