Education and career
Woodman grew up in Holywood, County Down and studied archaeology at Queen's University Belfast. After obtaining his doctorate, he became the Assistant Keeper of Prehistoric Antiquities at the Ulster Museum. In the 1970s he excavated Mesolithic sites at Mount Sandel Mesolithic site, Mount Sandel, the oldest known site of human occupation in Ireland, and Newferry in County Antrim. He became a professor at University College Cork in 1983, where he continued his research into the Mesolithic period, discovering some of the first evidence of the Mesolithic from the Republic of Ireland at Ferriter's Cove, Ferriter’s Cove on the Dingle Peninsula. After retiring, he published ''Ireland’s First Settlers: Time and the Mesolithic'', bringing together fifty years of research into the Irish Mesolithic. Woodman was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1982. He was awarded the Europa Prize by the The Prehistoric Society, Prehistoric Society in 2009, recognising outstanding contributions to the study of European prehistory. In the same year, the Prehistoric Society organised a conference and published a ''festschrift'' in his honour. Following Woodman's death in January 2017, J.P. Mallory, James Mallory described him as QUB's "most illustrious archaeology graduate", whose work provided the "basic structure of all subsequent research into the Irish Mesolithic".References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Woodman, Peter 1943 births 2017 deaths People from Holywood, County Down 20th-century Irish archaeologists 21st-century Irish archaeologists Archaeologists from Northern Ireland Irish prehistorians Alumni of Queen's University Belfast Irish curators Academics of University College Cork Fellows of the Society of Antiquaries of London Scholars and academics from County Down