Torben Bjarke Ballin

After having worked as a specialist and Project Manager in Denmark, the Faroe Islands and Norway, Torben Ballin relocated to Scotland in 1998. Since that year, he has worked as an independent lithics specialist in Scotland, England, Northern Ireland and Ireland, and he is an Honorary Fellow at the University of Bradford. Torben’s special interests have been lithic terminology and typology, lithic technology, chronological frameworks, raw material studies, intra-site spatial analyses, prehistoric territories and exchange networks, and – not least – Scotland’s Late Upper Palaeolithic (LUP) and Early Mesolithic industries. While still active in Denmark, he briefly worked with Jørgen Holm at the Hamburgian/Federmesser-Gruppen site of Slotseng in Southern Jutland, and one of his academic theses was on the refitting and spatial analysis of the LUP Brommian settlement of Højgård on Zealand. While in Norway, he led the Farsund Project and the Oslofjord Crossing Project, where he analysed a large number of Norwegian Early, Middle and Late Mesolithic sites and assemblages. Since 1998, Torben has dealt with numerous Mesolithic sites and assemblages from all parts of Scotland, and lately he has focused on the discovery of Scottish LUP sites, assemblages, and individual finds and, with the late Alan Saville of National Museums Scotland he published the Federmesser-Gruppen site of Kilmelfort Cave, Argyll; with Hein Bjerck, University of Trondheim, the unique LUP Fosna-Hensbacka point from Brodgar on Orkney; and with Headland Archaeology Ltd. the LUP site of Milltimber, Aberdeenshire. Torben has recently published a number of papers in which he discussed how to recognize individual LUP finds and assemblages on the basis of their technological attributes, when no diagnostic types are present.