Newcastle University

Guest speakers confirmed

Following the theme of the conference, Geoarchaeology from Landscape to Material Culture, and our aim to bring together geoarchaeologists from both geoscience and archaeological backgrounds, we are pleased to announce our guest speakers for DIG2017, whose expertise encompass geoarchaeology in all its forms, bringing both and archaeological and geoscience perspectives.

Dr Lisa Maher is Assistant Professor of Archaeology in the Department of Anthropology, Unviersity of California Berkeley. She directs the Geoarchaeology and Southwest Asia Prehistory Laboratory, which houses archaeological material from the Eastern Mediterranean as well as contemporary experimental lithic collections, and an archive/reference collection of sediment micromorphology slides from a variety of sites worldwide. Her research focuses on hunter-gatherer societies in the eastern Mediterranean, with the aim of reconstructing human-environment interactions during the Late Pleistocene. Particular interests are the periods leading up to farming, the Epi-Palaeolithic and early Neolithic, when the shift to farming first manifests in the archaeological record, in the form of intensified plant use, increased sedentism and population aggregations, architecture, complex site organization, far-reaching social interaction networks, and elaborate mortuary practices. Notably, it is during these periods when we see significant changes in human behavior with the intersection of regional-scale climate change and humans asagents of landscape change.

Paper: tbc

Professor Jamie Woodward is Professor of Physical Geography at the University of Manchester. He was part of a team that set up the Quaternary Environments and Geoarchaeology Research Group at Manchester in 2004, and much of his research is in collaboration with archaeologists. He is currently working on two projects in the Nile Valley of Northern Sudan, with archaeologists from the British Museum, investigating the relationship between human activity and environmental change over the last 10,000 years. He is also interested in the theoretical and practical interface between geography, geoscience and archaeology, and is co-editor of Geoarchaeology journal. He is also the author of The Ice Age: a Very Short Introduction.

Paper: tbc

 

Dr Maher and Professor Woodward will be joined by Professor Lucy Wilson (University of New Brunswick) and Dr Lisa-Marie Shillito (Newcastle University) who will be chairing the sessions.

Last modified: Tue, 21 Mar 2017 13:10:49 GMT