Moravian Gate project: Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge

Personnel

Prof. Martin Jones
Martin is the George Pitt-Rivers Professor of Archaeological Science at the University of Cambridge. He is the project's director and principal archaeobotanist. He is responsible for overall project strategy and team co-ordination.

Prof. Jiri Svoboda

Dr David Beresford-Jones
David is British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on the importance and use of arboreal resources in extreme environments in different parts of the world. In the context of the Moravian Gate project, he is exploring the use of charcoals and other plant macrofossils to understand Palaeolithic people-plant relationships.

Dr Lenka Lisa
Lenka was a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Cambridge. She is the quaternary geologist, currently researching into micromorphological evidence of loessic sediments which cover every Gravettian locality excavated within this project. She is doing palaeoenvironmental reconstructions, using micromorphology, geochemistry, GIS, etc.

Dr Martin Novak

Dr Miriam Nyvltova
Miriam is an osteologist at the Department of Palaeolithic and Palaeoethnology, Archaeological Institute, Czech Academy of Sciences, Brno. Her research focuses on investigating the archaeozoological remains from Dolni Vestonice and other Moravian Gate sites.

Dr Tamsin O'Connell
Tamsin is a Wellcome Trust University Award Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge. Her work focuses on improving understanding of the diets of Upper Palaeolithic humans, in particular at Dolni Vestonice and other Moravian Gate sites through analysing a wide suite of faunal remains for carbon and nitrogen isotopic signatures.

Dr Rhiannon Stevens
Rhiannon is a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on investigating the response of human to rapid climate change. She is reconstructing rapid climate changes through isotopic analysis of animal bones and teeth from European Palaeolithic archaeological sequences. She is interested in whether Upper Palaeolithic hominin cultural innovations resulted from novel problem-solving in the face of climatic and environmental stress.

Rebecca Farbstein
Rebecca is a PhD Student at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on reconstructing the social context supporting Pavlovian art production and technological micro-innovation. She is using a chaine operatoire methodology, which reconstructs stages in a production sequence. Building these sequences exposes previously overlooked technological choices and reveals the social motivations and decision-making of Palaeolithic artists at work. This type of analysis allows for several scales of interpretation (intra-site, inter-site, and inter-regional) which enable reconsideration of the cultural connections between purported related sites in the Pavlovian.

Clea Paine
Clea is a PhD student in geoarchaeology at the University of Cambridge. Her research interests include paleoenvironmental reconstruction and human responses to fluctuating climates. She is studying using micromorphological (soil thin section) analysis of loess, soils, and archaeological sediments to investigate the history of human occupation and climatic fluctuation at the sites of Dolni Vestonice and Predmosti. She is also researching the potential of isotopic analysis of small-scale synpedogenic calcium carbonate accumulations for reconstructing past environmental conditions.

Alex Pryor
Alex is a PhD. student at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on the response of human to climate change (e.g. in changes in geographic range, or behaviours observed). He is using oxygen isotope analyses of animal teeth to investigate whether Upper Palaeolithic sites across northern Europe and western Russia, including Moravia were occupied during cold or warm periods. He is then comparing the climatic reconstruction with the archaeological evidence for behavioural adaptations.

Patrick Skinner
Patrick is a Ph.D. student at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on hominin relations with cave bears in Czech Republic during OIS3. Through a combination of techniques (osteometric and stable isotope analyses, literature research, and GIS), he is trying to reveal the places in the landscape that cave bears and hominins used in order to locate potential encounters between the two. By revealing potential encounters and comparing these with relevant archaeological data (e.g. cave bear figurines, butchered cave bear bones), Patrick aims to improve understanding of the role that cave bears played in shaping hominin sense of identity.