Jim Crow is emeritus professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh and visiting professor at Newcastle University. He studied at Birmingham, Newcastle and Sofia Universities. 

From 1982-1989 he directed excavations for the National Trust on Hadrian’s Wall and was a member of the Management Committee for Hadrian’s Wall World Heritage Site.

He taught at Warwick and Newcastle Universities before his post at Edinburgh. At Newcastle he directed training excavations at High Rochester fort in Northumberland. In Turkey he has undertook survey projects on the Black Sea and from 1994 in the west hinterland of Istanbul, surveying and documenting the Anastasian Wall and the Water Supply of Byzantine Constantinople.

In 2012 he organised an exhibition with colleagues from Istanbul Technical University on the water supply at ANAMED (Research Centre for Anatolian Civilizations) in Istanbul. Up to March 2023  he was the co-investigator of a British Academy/British Institute at Ankara project on ‘Water in Istanbul, rising to the challenge’, contrasting water management between the Byzantine/early Ottoman and contemporary city.

His extensive publications include the English Heritage guidebook to Housesteads, two books on Hadrian’s Wall, a monograph on the water supply of Constantinople, an edited volume on Byzantine Naxos and the Aegean and numerous articles on frontiers, fortifications, hydraulic infrastructure and landscape archaeology in the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea.