This website stores cookies on your computer. These cookies are used to collect information about how you interact with our website and allow us to remember your browser. We use this information to improve and customize your browsing experience, for analytics and metrics about our visitors both on this website and other media, and for marketing purposes. By using this website, you accept and agree to be bound by UVic’s Terms of Use for web and social media privacy.  If you do not agree to the above, you can configure your browser’s setting to “do not track.”

Skip to main content
People Departments Maps Buildings Rooms A-Z
University
of Victoria
Apply Library
Sign in Online tools Sign out
Anthropology

Dr. April Nowell

Dr. April Nowell

Professor

Anthropology

Accepting graduate students

Contact:
Office: COR B340 250-721-7054
ORCID:
0000-0002-1103-2919
Credentials:
PhD (University of Pennsylvania)
Area(s) of expertise:
Neanderthal, Paleolithic art and archaeology, Hominin life histories, cognitive archaeology, archaeology of children, Levant and Europe

Bio

Dr. April Nowell is a Paleolithic archaeologist and Professor of Anthropology who specializes in cognitive archaeology, Paleolithic art, Neandertal lifeways, the archaeology of children and the relationship between science, pop culture, and the media. She is the author of Growing Up in the Ice Age (2021).

Courses

    • ANTH 341 Paleolithic Archaeology
    • ANTH 349 Paleolithic Art
    • ANTH 362 Archeology of Children
    • ANTH 441 Archaeological Theory
    • ANTH 499 Honours Seminar

Current projects

My book Growing Up in the Ice Age: Fossil and Archaeological Evidence of the Lived Lives of Plio-Pleistocene Children is the culmination of 20 years of research into the lives of Ice Age children and is the winner of the 2023 EAA Book Prize.

My research in Paleolithic art includes fieldwork in Koonalda Cave, Southern Australia in conjunction with Traditional Owners. Thousands of years ago, people visited the cave and drew with their fingers in soft sediment covering its walls and ceilings. We are studying these digital tracings within a broader tradition of performative storytelling. This research is sponsored by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

For thousands of years, plants and animals including early humans moved back and forth along the Levantine corridor—a geographic region that connects Africa to Eurasia.
At the margin of this corridor lies the Azraq Basin in the Eastern Desert of Jordan, which previously had extensive spring-fed wetlands at its center.

These wetlands remained intact until the early 1990s when the combination of climate change and years of water overdraw led to desiccation of the springs. The two largest aquifer-fed marshes, Druze Marsh (DM) and Shishan Marsh (SM), collapsed shortly after, with only 10% of the latter marsh remaining despite restoration efforts and ongoing maintenance.

The dropping water table exposed abundant Paleolithic sites. Our initial excavations at these marshes suggest that the Azraq Basin was continuously occupied by hominins from at least 300,000 years before present (BP). 

Our current project aims to evaluate the Azraq Basin as part of an inland dispersal corridor for early humans expanding out of Africa and spreading across SW Asia and beyond. This will be accomplished by examining the relationship between fluctuating freshwater resources and hominin adaptation in the Basin between 400,000–40,000 BP.

Building on previous work, the project entails targeting paleoenvironmental, geochronological, and technological analyses at key sites in the region, followed by comparisons with established records in the Levant to the west and central Arabia to the southeast. This research is sponsored by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

Neanderthal Sexual Behavior on “Betwixt the Sheets” podcast

 Dr. April Nowell’s TEDx talk

Selected publications

  • 2027.  Baxter, Jane Eva, Nowell, April and Ardren, Traci. Digging Deeper: An Introduction to Archaeology in the 21st Century.  Los Angeles: Sage Publishing   https://collegepublishing.sagepub.com/products/digging-deeper-1-276438 

  • 2024. Collins, Benjamin and Nowell, April (eds). Culturing the Body: Prehistoric Perspectives on Identity and Sociality.  New York: Berghahn Books

  • 2021. Nowell, April. Growing Up in the Ice Age: Fossil and Archaeological Evidence of the Lived lives of Plio-Pleistocene Children. Oxford: Oxbow Books.

  • 2021. Davidson, Iain and Nowell, April (eds.). Making Scenes: Global Perspective on Scenes in Rock Art.  New York: Berghahn Books.

  • 2018. Gonlin, Nancy and Nowell, April (eds.). Archaeology of the Night.  Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado.

  • In Press.  Skala, Aurora, Nowell, April, Walkus, Jennifer, and McLaren, Duncan.   A storied landscape: Rock art in Kitasoo/Xai’xais, Heiltsuk, and Wuikinuxv territories.  In New Approaches to Rock Art in Canada: Indigenous knowledges, Sacred Landscapes and Cultural Heritage, edited by Dagmara Zawadzka, Oscar Moro Abadía and Bryn Tapper. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.

  • 2025. French, Jennifer and Nowell, April. Adolescence in the European Upper Paleolithic: Are there temporal and spatial trends? In Small Adults or Big Kids? Exploring Archaeological and Bioarchaeological Approaches to Adolescence, edited by Dana Thacher and Creighton Avery. Berghahn books.
  • 2025. Riede, Felix and Nowell, April. Children of the Ice Age: Apprenticeship, communities of practice and embodied cognition in deep-time hunter-gatherer archaeology. In A Field Guide to Cross-Cultural Research on Childhood Learning: Theoretical, methodological, practical, and ethical considerations for an interdisciplinary field, edited by Sheina Lew-Levy and Stephen Asatsa. Open Book Publishers, pp. 50-51.
  • 2025. Kroupin, Ivan, Reide, Felix, Nowell, April and Medaets, Chantal. Notes on a difficult terrain. In A Field Guide to Cross-Cultural Research on Childhood Learning: Theoretical, methodological, practical, and ethical considerations for an interdisciplinary field, edited by Sheina Lew-Levy and Stephen Asatsa. Open Book Publishers, pp. 61-63.

  • 2024. Nowell, April and Skala, Aurora. The well-dressed hominin: clothing, tanning, and textile production in the Paleolithic.  In Culturing the Body: Prehistoric Perspectives on Identity and Sociality, edited by Benjamin R. Collins and April Nowell. New York: Berghahn Books

  • 2024. Collins, Benjamin R., Nowell, April, Hatton Amy, and Ames, Christopher J. H. Manufacturing social landscape: Ostrich eggshell bead production and social connections at Grassridge Rockshelter, South Africa.  In Culturing the Body: Prehistoric Perspectives on Identity and Sociality, edited by Benjamin R. Collins and April Nowell.   New York: Berghahn Books.
  • 2023. Skala, Aurora, Nowell, April, Walkus, Jennifer, and McLaren, Duncan. A storied landscape: Rock art in Kitasoo/Xai’xais, Heiltsuk, and Wuikinuxv territories. In New Approaches to Rock Art in Canada: Indigenous knowledges, Sacred Landscapes and Cultural Heritage, edited by Dagmara Zawadzka, Oscar Moro Abadía and Bryn Tapper. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.
  • 2022. Kubicka, Anna Maria, Wragg-Sykes, Rebecca, Nowell, April, and Nelson, Emma. Neanderthal Sexual Behaviour. In The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Sexual Psychology, Volume 4, edited by Todd K. Shackelford. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 
  • 2021. Nowell, April, Kurki, Helen and Mitchell, Lisa M. Conceiving reproduction in archaeology. In Routledge Handbook on Anthropology and Reproduction, edited by Sallie Han and Cecelia Tomori. London: Routledge, pp. 68-84.
  • 2021. Davidson, Iain and Nowell, April. Introduction. Behind the scenes—did scenes in rock art create new ways of seeing the world? In I. Davidson & A. Nowell (Eds.), Making Scenes: Global Perspectives on Scenes in Rock Art. New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 1-16.
  • 2021. Van Gelder, Leslie and Nowell, April. Scene makers: Finger fluters in Upper Paleolithic caves. In Making Scenes: Scenes in Global Rock Art, edited by Iain Davidson and April Nowell. New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 194-206.
  • 2021. Davidson, Iain and Nowell, April. Epilogue. Is there more to scenes than meets the eye? In Making Scenes: Global Perspectives on Scenes in Rock Art, edited by I. Davidson and A. Nowell. New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 327-331.
  • 2021. Nowell, April and Cooke, Amanda. Culturing the body: adornment and ornamentation. In Oxford Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution, edited by Andrew Lock, Chris Sinha and Nathalie Gontier. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 1-32.