I was born in Derby although my family on my fathers side has 19th century roots in Scotland. At the age of sixteen my parents decided that Australia was the place to live and so I finished off High School out there and then went off to the University of Western Australia to study Science. I ended up with a Ph.D. in Chemistry at about the time that the Australian minister for Science (Barry Jones) said “It has come to the point where a young man with a PhD in Chemistry is an embarrassment to his family and has to leave the country to get a job. I left Australia and spent a little while as a post-doc at Oxford. I’ve never married and these days I work in Operational Analysis in Hampshire.
The thing I like about “Time Team” is that it combines science and history in a nice multi-disciplinary way that brings out the strengths and weaknesses of all of the techniques. I like reading history from any period (and find the dark ages very intriguing) but growing up in Derby gave me a very strong interest in railways and I am still a member of the Australian Railway Historical Society.
Special Interest Areas
Almost anything after the Neolithic
Website
http://website.lineone.net/~asmay Website dedicated to West Australian Railway Rolling stock