Paul Richards is currently Professor of Technology and Agrarian Development at Wageningen University, The Netherlands. He was a member of the Department of Anthropology at the University College of London (UCL) for 20 years from 1979 (Head of Department 1989-1992, Professor from 1992). While in UCL, he specialised in ecological anthropology, technology studies and West African ethnography. His main fieldwork focus was on Sierra Leone, and included studies of Mende village rice farming systems and forest conservation on the Liberian border. He continued to work on and in Sierra Leone during the period of the civil war (1992-2002) and has written extensively on that conflict, and on the anthropology of modern armed conflicts more generally. His work continues to focus on technique and skill, as exemplified (in particular) in agricultural seed systems and techniques of African guerrilla warfare, but now incorporates a focus on distributed cognition. On a practical level, he has advised a number of aid and humanitarian agencies on African post-war reconstruction, demobilization and skills-training issues. He is currently implementing research on seed systems designed to foster cooperation between genetic, evolutionary and cultural aspects of anthropology. Click here for his list of publications.