Professor José Iriarte is an Archaeologist and Archaeobotanist with a strong track record of research on human-environmental interactions, the peopling of the Americas, the development of agricultural economies, and the emergence of complex societies in lowland South and Central America. He directs the University of Exeter Archaeobotany and Paleoecology Laboratory and is a member of the Centre for the Archaeology of the Americas and the HUMANE research group. 

Professor Iriarte currently directs the ERC-funded project ‘Last Journey – The End of the Journey: The Late Pleistocene-Early Holocene Colonisation of South America’ (2019-2025), which examines the colonisation of the last terra incognita (other than Antarctica) by humans. This process occurred amidst one of the most significant climatic, environmental, and subsistence regime shifts in human history, coeval with the extinction of megafauna (the most recent substantial extinction event in the geological record), the process of plant domestication, and resulting in today’s remarkable diversity of indigenous South American groups.

Professor Iriarte is also a National Geographic Explorer, and his research has extensive visibility in international media, including BBC, Channel 4, National Geographic, New Scientist, Scientific American, The Guardian, Wall Street Journal.