In 1972, Renfrew became Professor of Archaeology at the
University of Southampton, succeeding
Barry Cunliffe. During his time at
Southampton he directed excavations at
Quanterness in Orkney and
Phylakopi on the island of
Milos, Greece. In 1973, Renfrew published Before Civilisation: The Radiocarbon Revolution and Prehistoric Europe in which he challenged the assumption that prehistoric cultural innovation originated in the
Near East and then spread to Europe. He also excavated with
Marija Gimbutas at Sitagroi.
In 1987, he published Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of the Indo-European Origins, a book on the
Proto-Indo-Europeans. His "
Anatolian hypothesis" posited that this group lived 2,000 years before the
Kurgans, in
Anatolia, later diffusing to Greece, then Italy, Sicily, Corsica, the Mediterranean coast of France, Spain, and Portugal. Another branch migrated along the fertile river valleys of the
Danube and
Rhine into central and northern Europe.
In 1996, Renfrew formulated a
sapient paradox, that can be formulated as ""why there was such a long gap between emergence of genetically and anatomically modern humans and the development of complex behaviors?"[6][7]
Renfrew served as
Master of
Jesus College, Cambridge from 1986 until 1997. In 2004, he retired from the Disney Professorship and is now a Senior Fellow at the McDonald Institute. From 2006 to 2008 he directed new excavations on the Cycladic Island of
Keros, and is currently co-director of the Keros Island Survey.
Honorary degrees from the
Universities of Sheffield, Athens, Southampton, Liverpool, Edinburgh, St Andrews, Kent, London and Lima.
Books
Renfrew, A.C., 1972, The Emergence of Civilisation: The Cyclades and the Aegean in The Third Millennium BC, London.
Renfrew, A.C., 1973, Before Civilisation, the Radiocarbon Revolution and Prehistoric Europe, London: Pimlico.
ISBN0-7126-6593-5
Renfrew, A.C. and
Kenneth L. Cooke, eds. 1979 Transformations: Mathematical Approaches to Culture Change. New York: Academic Press.
ISBN978-0-12-586050-5
Renfrew, A.C. and Malcolm Wagstaff, eds., 1982, An Island Polity, the Archaeology of Exploitation in
Melos, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Colin Renfrew,
Marija Gimbutas and Ernestine S. Elster, eds. 1986. Excavations at Sitagroi, a prehistoric village in northeast Greece. Vol. 1. Los Angeles : Institute of Archaeology, University of California.
Renfrew, A.C., 1987, Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins, London: Pimlico.
ISBN0-7126-6612-5
Renfrew, A.C. and Ezra B. W. Zubrow, eds. 1994, The ancient mind: elements of cognitive archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
ISBN978-0-521-45620-3
Renfrew, A.C. and
Paul Bahn, 1991, Archaeology: Theories, Methods and Practice, London: Thames & Hudson.
ISBN0-500-28147-5. (Sixth edition 2012)[12]
Renfrew, A.C., 2000, Loot, Legitimacy and Ownership: The Ethical Crisis in Archaeology, London: Duckworth.
ISBN0-7156-3034-2
Renfrew, A.C., 2003, Figuring It Out: The Parallel Visions of Artists and Archaeologists, London: Thames & Hudson.
ISBN0-500-05114-3
Ernestine S. Elster and Colin Renfrew, eds., 2003. Prehistoric Sitagroi: Excavations in Northeast Greece, 1968–1970. Vol. 2: The Final Report. Los Angeles, CA: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA. Monumenta archaeologica 20.
Renfrew, A.C., and Paul Bahn, eds. Archaeology: The Key Concepts. London: Routledge, 2005.
Renfrew, A.C., and Paul Bahn, Archaeology Essentials: Theories, Methods and Practice, London: Thames & Hudson.
ISBN978-0-500-84138-9. (Fourth edition 2018).
Renfrew, A.C., 2008, Prehistory: The Making of the Human Mind, Modern Library.
ISBN0-679-64097-5
Matsumura S., Forster P. and Renfrew C., eds., 2008, Simulations, Genetics and Human Prehistory, Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archeological Research.
ISBN978-1-902937-45-8
Articles
"Models of change in language and archaeology", Transactions of the Philological Society 87 (1989): 103–55.
"Archaeology, genetics and linguistic diversity", Man 27 (1992): 445–78.
"Time depth, convergence theory, and innovation in Proto-Indo-European: 'Old Europe' as a PIE linguistic area", Journal of Indo-European Studies 27 (1999): 257–93.
"'Indo-European' designates languages: not pots and not institutions", Antiquity 79 (2005): 692–5.
"Archaeogenetics", in Archaeology: The Key Concepts, eds. Colin Renfrew & Paul Bahn. London: Routledge, 2005, pp. 16–20.
"Phylogenetic network analysis of SARS-CoV-2 genomes", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, April 8, 2020[13]
^The Archaeological Field Club.
"Alumni". archaeology.uk.com.
^Renfrew, Colin (1982). Towards an Archaeology of Mind: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered before the University of Cambridge on 30th November 1982. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
doi:
10.1080/00665983.1984.11077826.
^Renfrew, Colin (1994). "Towards a Cognitive Archaeology". In Renfrew, Colin; Zubrow, Ezra B W (eds.). In The Ancient Mind: Elements of Cognitive Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 3–12.
ISBN9780521456203.
^Malafouris, Lambros; Renfrew, Colin, eds. (2010). The Cognitive Life of Things: Recasting the Boundaries of the Mind. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.
ISBN9781902937519.
^Renfrew, Colin (1 February 2008).
"Solving the "Sapient Paradox"". BioScience. 58 (2): 171–172.
doi:10.1641/B580212. called the "sapient paradox," that some of the complex behaviors now associated with humans took a long time to develop even after the emergence in Africa of humans who were fully modern in the anatomical and genetic senses.