Vincent Gaffney MBE FSA (born 25 February 1958) is a British archaeologist and the Anniversary Chair in Landscape Archaeology at the University of Bradford.

Encouraged by a grandfather with similar interests, he was fortunate enough to attend the Vindolanda excavations - sponsored by Rutherford Comprehensive - where he experienced archaeology first hand and met Robin and Anthony Birley on the site.

Taking his first degree at the University of Reading, he studied with Richard Bradley, Michael Fulford and Robert Chapman and cut his archaeological teeth in field schools at sites including the Roman town at Silchester and the prehistoric enclosure at South Lodge.

However, during this period, the Eastern Hvar survey, led by Tim Kaiser, Branko Kirigin and John Hayes, was reformulated into the Adriatic Islands Project in 1991/2 .

Here, the myriad of small islands and good harbours provided numerous opportunities for interaction and the region has easy access south to Greece, north to the Po valley.

The results demonstrated the role of long-distance contacts in settlement development, plus the nature of direct intervention and colonisation, either by expansive local groups or major colonial powers including Greek city states or Rome.

The project undertook excavations at Grabčeva Špilja, the Greek colony at Pharos, Krajcina Spilja and the hilltop enclosure at Škrip.

Recognising the increasing significance of visualisation within the Humanities as well as science, he, with Paul Hatton and Glynn Barratt, founded the Visual and Spatial Technology Centre (VISTA) at Birmingham.

[8][18] Several major projects were undertaken during this time and included the study of the Warren Field pit alignment,[5] landscape management at Fort Hood, in Texas, with Cheryl Huckerby[10] and work with Paul Robertson and Helen Patterson at Forum Novum in the Sabina, Italy.

As part of a collaboration with Ante Milosević, an Anglo-Croatian team began a project to carry out work in the extensively waterlogged Sinj field in the Cetina valley in Croatia.

[22][23] Following funding by the Aggregates Levy (English Heritage) and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, the project mapped c. 43,000 square kilometres of early Mesolithic landscape beneath the North Sea.

[26][27][28] Currently, the presence of such material is probably explained as the product of pioneer events in advance of the spread of agriculture, and that such data are either not preserved, or present, within the terrestrial record and away from the coast.

Material from the cores has provided sedimentary DNA, as well as conventional environmental data, and these will be used in a major computational modelling programme replicating colonisation of the submerged landscape.