William Cavanagh has collaborated with fellow scholars and published mainly on Greek archaeology. Intensive survey of 70 km2 in central Laconia documented some 400 sites of all periods (Laconia Survey; Laconia Rural Sites Project with Christopher Mee). He has published on funerary archaeology (e.g. A Private Place: Death in Prehistoric Greece with Christopher Mee) and on mathematical approaches to archaeology (Bayesian Approach to Archaeological Inference). Until retirement he was Lecturer, Reader and then Professor at the University of Nottingham, where he is now Professor Emeritus of Aegean Archaeology and co-director of the Centre for Spartan and Peloponnesian Studies.