April Nowell

April Nowell (born 1969) is a Paleolithic archaeologist, Professor of Anthropology and Distinguished Lansdowne Fellow at the University of Victoria, Canada. Her book Growing Up in the Ice Age (2021) won the 2023 European Association of Archaeologists Book Prize.

Career Nowell is a Professor of Anthropology and Distinguished Lansdowne Fellow at the University of Victoria, Canada. Nowell leads an international research team and collaborates on multiple projects worldwide. Her areas of study include Lower and Middle Paleolithic sites in Jordan, cave art in Australia and France, and ostrich eggshell beads in South Africa.

Nowell and von Petzinger have also created a database of symbols from more than 200 cave walls in France and Spain, such as Rouffignac, Chauvet and Lascaux. The symbols tended to be ignored next to the caves' vibrant paintings of animals. Documenting their location, time, and relationship to other markings led to the identification of twenty-six specific repeated signs. These included basic shapes like triangles, squares, full circles, semicircles, open angles, crosses and grouped dots, and more complex drawings of negative hands, finger flutings, branch-like penniforms, and hut-like tectiforms. Dating suggests that some signs originally appeared as truncated images of animals, and eventually became symbolic representations of concepts. Surprisingly, symbols often appeared in specific clusters, which were repeated in different caves, such as the combination of a negative hand with finger fluting. Nowell has cautioned: "This is not writing as we know it or language as we understand it. However, in these caves we are looking at the patterning of symbols"

In Jordan, Nowell's team has worked at the Azraq Basin, an area east of Amman that was once a wetland oasis, but is now a desert. They have recovered 10,000 well-preserved Middle Pleistocene stone tools, some of which they have examined for traces of protein residue using crossed immunoelectrophoresis (CIEP). Time Magazine listed the blood residue work among its top 100 discoveries. At Grassridge Rockshelter in the Eastern Cape, they have identified both ostrich eggshell beads at all stages of manufacture, and marine shell beads. Since Grassridge is at least from the coast, this supports the idea that extensive social networks existed during the southern Africa Holocene.

In her examinations of archaeological evidence and visual material culture, Nowell emphasizes the importance of social interaction within communities. She has documented the lives of children, who were present alongside adults during many activities, as shown by evidence from Palaeolithic caves in Europe. Examinations of the archaeological record have typically studied adults rather than children. Nowell's work has challenged the invisibility of children in the Paleolithic archaeological record and filled a significant gap in physical and behavioral anthropology.

Nowell's book Growing Up in the Ice Age has been described as both "illuminating and engaging" and "carefully written and impeccably researched". "given to an established researcher in recognition of outstanding, internationally recognized contributions to scholarship in their area of expertise". 2023, European Archaeological Association Book Prize, for Growing Up in the Ice Age (2021)

Selected publications Books

Papers