[6] Deciding to study the subject at the undergraduate level, he attended the University of Southampton, attaining a first class BA with honours in Archaeology in 1979.
[7] He obtained his PhD from King's College, Cambridge in 1985, for a thesis titled "Death, society and social change: the Iron Age of southern Jutland 200 BC – 600 AD" in which he discussed what was known about the bog bodies of Iron Age Denmark; it would remain unpublished.
[7][8][9] Supervised by Ian Hodder as a post-graduate at Cambridge, Parker Pearson was a contemporary of Sheena Crawford, Daniel Miller, Henrietta Moore, Christopher Tilley and Alice Welbourn; these students were influenced by Hodder's ideas, then a pioneering part of the post-processualist current within archaeological theory.
In the 1984 anthology Ideology, Power and Prehistory, edited by Daniel Miller and Christopher Tilley, Parker Pearson published a paper in which he examined the pre-state societies of Jutland from a Marxist perspective.
[10] From 1984 through to 1990, Parker Pearson worked as an Inspector of Monuments for English Heritage,[7] and in 1989 he received membership to the Institute for Archaeologists.
[7] Parker Pearson and his team of researchers played a key role in the discovery of a new henge site along the River Avon that links to Stonehenge.