Chief Charles Thurstan Shaw CBE FBA FSA (27 June 1914 – 8 March 2013) was an English archaeologist, the first trained specialist to work in what was then British West Africa.

Shaw's excavations at Igbo-Ukwu, Nigeria, revealed a 9th-century indigenous culture that created sophisticated work in bronze metalworking, independent of any Arab or European influence and centuries before other sites that were better known at the time of discovery.

[5] Shaw was encouraged by Louis Leakey to go to the Gold Coast (later Ghana) to work in archaeology.

[7] In 1959, Shaw was invited by the antiquities department of Nigeria to perform an excavation at Igbo-Ukwu, where numerous ancient bronzes had been found by a villager.

[8] Shaw's excavation revealed bronze pieces that were evidence of a sophisticated Igbo civilization from the ninth century.

These revealed extensive bronzes, as well as thousands of trade beads, evidence of a commercial network extending to Egypt.

[14] He returned to England from Africa in 1976 when appointed Director of Studies in Archaeology and Anthropology at Magdalene College, Cambridge.

[4] In 1939 he married Ione Magor, and they had two sons and three daughters together; his many grandchildren include Julian Gough, who also went to Sidney Sussex.

At the World Archeology Conference in 1986, he took part in a boycott against South African academics as an anti-apartheid measure.

[3] A brief, affectionate and informative account, with a photograph, of Shaw as an undergraduate appears in the June 1936 issue of the Sidney Sussex magazine, The Pheon.