Robert Andrew Foley, FBA (born 18 March 1953) is a British anthropologist, archaeologist, and academic, specialising in human evolution.

The centre was designed to provide a home for the Duckworth Collection, and first class laboratories and facilities to support research in human evolution which integrated genetics, anthropology, and other fields.

His early work was on the Later Stone Age of East Africa, where he developed methods and ideas to study the landscape distributions of artefacts, giving rise to the sub-field of Off-Site Archaeology.

[citation needed] Since the 1990s, Foley has collaborated with Marta Mirazón Lahr on research relating to the evolution of modern humans and their diversity.

In Turkana, Foley and Mirazon Lahr study the late Quaternary record of human occupation in the basin, and have recently described a group of 10,000 year-old skeletons from the site of Nataruk that died as part of conflict between hunter-gatherer bands.