In 1992, Gaffney was employed at the University of Birmingham, rising from a research fellow at the Birmingham University Field Archaeology Unit (BUFAU) – later Birmingham Archaeology. During this time, he established archaeological computing, in academic terms, at the department. In 1996 he received funding from the Leverhulme Trust to study the Roman town at Wroxeter, Viriconium Cornoviorum. As part of a team with Simon Buteux, Roger White, Martin van Leusen and Christopher Gaffney, the Wroxeter Hinterland Project undertook the first complete geophysical survey of a complete Roman Town in Britain, in collaboration with researchers from across the world. The University of Birmingham was awarded the Queen's Anniversary Prize in 1996 for this research. At the end of the 90s, Gaffney, with Ron Yorston, Ann Woodward and Sally Exon, undertook the Stonehenge Landscapes Project using java-applets to explore the GIS data from a major digital landscape study of the Stonehenge Landscape, incorporating tens of thousands of GIS viewsheds as part of the interactive publication. During the first decade of the 21st century Vince Gaffney was increasingly engaged within academic management. After initially taking a part-time lectureship in the Department of Ancient History and Archaeology at Birmingham, he was given a Chair in Landscape Archaeology and Geomatics in 2004. Between 2002 and 2015 he founded, and was Director of, a larger academic grouping entitled the Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity (now the Department of Classics, Ancient History and Archaeology). Between 2008-11, he was Director of Research and Knowledge Transfer within the newly formed College of Arts and Law at the University of Birmingham. Recognising the increasing significance of visualisation within the Humanities as well as science, he, with Paul Hatton and Glynn Barratt, founded the Visual and Spatial Technology Centre (VISTA) at Birmingham. At its peak VISTA carried out multiple, global digital projects, and staff trained in the centre now work in many digital or academic groups. Several major projects were undertaken during this time and included the study of the Warren Field pit alignment, landscape management at Fort Hood, in Texas, with Cheryl Huckerby and work with Paul Robertson and Helen Patterson at Forum Novum in the Sabina, Italy. As part of a collaboration with Ante Milosević, an Anglo-Croatian team began a project to carry out work in the extensively waterlogged Sinj field in the Cetina valley in Croatia.