People
![[Photo of Preston Miracle]](450-ptm21.jpg "Preston Miracle")
Preston Thor Miracle
University Senior Lecturer
Office: 1.5, West Building.
Phone: +44 (0) 1223 333532
Fax: +44 (0) 1223 333503
Email: ptm21@cam.ac.uk
Entry in the University's Lookup directory service (restricted access)
Current Research Interests
My field and laboratory research in recent years has centred on four major themes. The first is human strategies and agency in the context of environmental and social changes from the end of the last ice age through the spread of farming in Southern Europe; this has been the focus of fieldwork in Istria, Croatia. The Pupicina cave project involved examining the nature and tempo of environmental changes across the Pleistocene–Holocene boundary, the timing and nature of human (re)colonization of the area, the social contexts of these changes, and the spread/adoption of food production. We have excavated over a dozen sites from nearly 50 prehistoric sites identified in survey; analyses have involved about 20 scholars.
A second theme is the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic body; this research is being conducted as part of the five-year, Cambridge-based, Leverhulme-funded project on Changing beliefs about the human body. This project includes a new synthesis of the emergence of the constructed body with the `Human Revolution', and the detailed analysis of body treatment and embodiment in three diachronic case studies: Natufian–PPNB, southern Scandinavia, Danube Gorges.
A third theme is Neandertal subsistence practices as revealed through zooarchaeological analyses. This zooarchaeological work has focussed on key Mousterian sites from Croatia, of which the most prominent is Krapina. Krapina has been central to discussions of morphological variability in Neandertals, their mortuary behaviour, and `cannibalism'. In my recent monograph on the faunal remains from the site, I focus on the competence of Neandertals in food procurement (including rhino hunting) as well as their behavioural flexibility.
The fourth theme is the social contexts of food preparation and consumption. This theme was relatively neglected by archaeologists until recently; I have approached it through zooarchaeology—specifically feasting in the Mesolithic.