Our People

Dr Michael Dawson

Member of Common Room

Editor and Archaeologist

Oxford Lifelong Learning

DPhil (Oxford); MPhil (Notts); BA (Hons) (Cardiff); BA (Liverpool Polytechnic)

Dr Michael Dawson, FSA, MCIfA, is an archaeologist, consultant and author, specialising in urbanisation and landscapes of the Roman period. He is an editor and has been an Extra Mural lecturer for the Dept of Continuing Education at Oxford.

After many years as a field archaeologist, he became Principal Archaeologist at the land management company Samual Rose before moving to CgMs where he was a Director of Heritage. Michael formally retired as consultant in 2024 but continued in his role as editor, lecturing with the Dept of Continuing Education at Oxford, and as an independent researcher.

Michael’s academic background is in the relationship between policy and practice in the historic environment, institutional agency, Roman urbanism, and the representation of Roman Britain. In his DPhil he looked at the contemporary management of Roman mosaic pavements (Spectacle and Display: A Modern History of Britain’s Roman Mosaic Pavements – Archaeopress 2021). Since the 1980s he has been engaged in the archaeology of Roman Dacia, publishing on Roman urbanism in the province. More recently, with co-authors Prof David Mattingly (Leics) and Prof Andrew Wilson (Oxford), he was project manager of a commission by the Ministry of Culture which led to a ‘Statement of Significance’ for the Roman mines at Roşia Montană. The Statement was instrumental in the designation of the gold mines as a World Heritage site in 2021.

Educated at Trent College in Derbyshire, Liverpool Polytechnic (BA), Universities of Cardiff (BA), Nottingham (MPhil) and Oxford (DPhil), Michael began his career in mid-Wales as a field archaeologist and Education Officer. Between 1981 and 1987 he excavated in the UK, Romania and Bulgaria before joining Bedfordshire County Council Archaeology Service, first as a field officer then Project Manager and assistant to the director until 1998. From 2002 until 2024 he was principal consultant and a Heritage Director at CgMs, later RPS and finally TetraTech consultancy. As a consultant he represented clients in the Crown and County Courts and at Public Inquiry, engaging with a wide spectrum of issues in the historic environment for commercial clients, the Church Commissioners and government agencies. His experience led to the recently published Heritage Under Pressure. Studies of Agency and ‘Soft’ Power in the Historic Environment (Oxbow 2019) and Engaging with Heritage and Historic Environment Policy: Agency, Interpretation and Implementation (Routledge 2021). In 2025 he strayed into the world of historic buildings publishing ‘Boathouses of Britain’ (Amberley), the first book of its kind to explore this class of building.

Michael is a former Chair of the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists (2004-08), has served as Secretary of the Standing Conference of Archaeology Unit Managers, and a member of the Bedfordshire Archaeological Council. He is a fellow of the London Society of Antiquaries. Recently he has contributed to and co-edited a collection of essays looking at the professionalisation of archaeological practice (Promoting the Profession: Papers in Honour of Peter Hinton Director of the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists 1997-2025 (Archaeopress 2026). The collection has been an opportunity to raise awareness of the health and wellbeing benefits of archaeological as a key factor in archaeological practice.

Firmly committed to good regulatory practice, Michael contributed to the Highways Agency’s guidance Assessing the Effect of Road Schemes on Historic Landscape Character and the Institute of Civil Engineers Conditions of Contract for Archaeological Investigation. He has served on the National Trust’s ‘Chedworth Research and Publication Board’.

Michael has been editor of the journal Historic Environment Policy and Practice since 2018. In 2024, horrified by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he published ‘War and the Historic Environment’ (Routledge). It was an opportunity to gather journal papers and reveal the effects of war, from the destruction and manipulation of the historic environment in Ukraine to the use of archaeological evidence in the prosecution of war crimes. Journals are critical in the transmission of peer reviewed research and in the midst of contemporary concerns for the integrity of data, remain an essential part of academic life.