Sam Moorhead was awarded a scholarship to read Classical Archaeology and Ancient History at the University North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Here, he published his first book on numismatics and has written numerous articles on Roman coin hoards and site-finds ever since. He won his MPhil from UCL for a study of Roman coins in Wiltshire. He has participated on excavations in the Meidterranean and the Near East and worked on the pottery at Tell Jezreel that led to the radical reappraisal of Iron Age chronology in Palestine. Currently, he is working on the coins found in the excavations at Butrint in Albania.

For many years he taught archaeology and ancient history before joining the British Museum as Staff Lecturer in Archaeology. He was on the team that made the award-winning Virtually the Ice Age website for Creswell Crags. As the Curator of Interpretation he worked on some major exhibitions like Mummy, the Inside Story, Persia and Michelangelo. He serves on several archaeological and numismatic committees, including the Royal Numismatic Society, and also is Senior Keeper at the Palestine Exploration Fund for whom he has published the work of Leonard Woolley and T. E. Lawrence in the Negeb Desert.