Paola Villa is an Italian archaeologist with a doctorate in Classical Archaeology from the University of Rome and a Ph D in Prehistoric Archaeology from the University of California at Berkeley. She has done and published research on the early phases of European prehistory, on bone taphonomy, on cannibalism, on the Middle Stone Age of South Africa and more recently on Neandertals. She was Professor at the University of Bordeaux in France and is currently Curator Adjoint at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History.