Congratulations to Sarah who received a British Academy post-doctoral fellowship for her work "Investigating Neolithic villages and farming communities in Jordan: developing and validating new scientific multi-methodologies"! This research will develop new scientific inter-disciplinary methods and tools to investigate human and animal occupation signatures recorded in cultural deposits that accumulated in Pre-Pottery Neolithic settlements in Jordan. The project will involve the analysis of sediment samples from known activity areas in modern villages and dung samples from targeted animal species, which will then act as a comparative dataset to interpret samples from Neolithic sites.
Congratulations Taylor!
Congratulations to Taylor who received his PhD at the CAU Kiel for his stable isotopic and stable isotopic research on ancient pastoralist lifeways in Central Asia! His dissertation is entitled "The pastoralist distinction of Central Asia: isotopic and genetic approaches to foodways, mobility, and trans-regional contract from the early Bronze Age to medieval period".
Jade Whitlam Awarded a British Academy Post-doctoral Fellowship!
Congratulations to Jade who received a British Academy post-doc fellowship at Oxford University for her work "Farming before agriculture: investigating variability in plant management and consumption by western Asia’s earliest cultivators"! Her work examines how communities tended and consumed plants at three recently excavated early Neolithic sites in Iran and Jordan (10,000–7500 BC), including Sharara, by combining innovative isotopic and ecological analyses of plant remains with spatial and functional material culture.
Shira Gur-Arieh Awarded a Marie-Curie Post-doctoral Fellowship!
Congratulations to Shira!!! She received a Marie-Curie post-doctoral fellowship for her research 'Dung as Construction Material during the Emergence of Animal Domestication: A Multi-Proxy Approach". Her research (MapDung) will explore the possible early use of dung for construction as a proxy for understanding human-animal-environment relations during the Neolithic in the Near East. As part of this, Shira is developing new multi-proxy methodologies for improved identification of dung and studying the post depositional processes that affect archaeological dung used for construction in order to gain wide regional understanding of the utilization of animal secondary products and the socio-cultural aspects related to its use.
