The Omar and Althea Hoskins Professor of Classics, is an archaeologist at Stanford University, Director of Stanford Archaeology Center's Metamedia Lab. He co-directs Stanford Humanities Lab, a ground-breaking trans-disciplinary center of digital humanities. Two questions have driven his research into prehistoric Europe, Design - from Classical antiquity to the contemporary fine arts — How are we to understand people and societies through the things they make and leave behind? And - How are we to write the archaeological past on the basis of what is left behind? - a question of the documentation of event. This historiographic interest in documenting the presence of the past has led to a range of experimental work, including a major project with performance artist Mike Pearson — Theatre/Archaeology, defined as the rearticulation of fragments of the past as real-time event. His many major publications include:

• ReConstructing Archaeology (Cambridge 1987),
• Social Theory and Archaeology (Polity 1987),
• Art and the Greek City State (Cambridge 1999),
• Classical Archaeology: Experiences of the Discipline (Routledge 1996),
• Experiencing the Past: On the Character of Archaeology (Routledge 1992),
• with Mike Pearson, Theatre/Archaeology (Routledge 2001).

From 1997 to 2004 Michael was a Company Director of Brith Gof, a leading multimedia and performance company working in Europe. Michael's Metamedia Lab applies an archaeological sensibility to media new and old.