Network Co-organisers

Auréade Henry is an archaeobotanist (charcoal/wood/phytoliths) based at CNRS (Nice, France). Auréade specialises in fire, wood and plant use at the Late Pleistocene-Holocene transition in Eurasia and Northern America. Her current research topics include firewood use and the emergence of the Alaskan boreal forest, climate, people and plants in Eurasia at the end of the LGM and Mesolithic wood use. Ethnoarchaeological and taphonomical approaches are also of special interest to her.

Ceren Kabukcu is an archaeobotanist specialising on the analysis of charred plant macro-fossils (charcoal, seeds, tubers, etc.), with a focus on plant food, wood fuel use and woodland management in prehistory. Her work investigates the deep histories of human foodways and management of vegetation resources in Southwest Asia and Mediterranean Europe, looking at plant species targeted by prehistoric foragers and early farmers from late-Middle Palaeolithic through early Neolithic periods. Ceren is based at ICArEHB in Portugal. She is interested in developing experimental approaches to investigate use-related traces on plant food processing.wooden implements.

Claire Alix is associate professor in Arctic archaeology at Pantheon-Sorbonne University (Paris) and an affiliate researcher at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Claire’s research focuses on the last 2000 years of changes in Inuit cultural trajectories and material culture in the larger Bering Strait region. She specialises in analysis of wood from mostly treeless contexts where the main resource is driftwood, to characterize woodworking technologies and wood management. Claire combines local expert knowledge with characterization of archaeological wood (xylology, dendrochronology, etc.) to understand selection, technologies, and contexts of driftwood use.

Damien’s interests began with woodworking, traditional tools and variations in woody raw materials, initially working on traditional wooden boats, and as a waterfront carpenter. His undergraduate dissertation at UCL focused on the evidence for Palaeolithic woodworking, including some experimentation and ethnography. As a field archaeologist, Damien eventually worked in waterlogged sites in London and took on a role as a specialist in wood finds from late prehistoric through Medieval times (and beyond). His PhD at UCL also focused on wood, including experimental archaeology and tool mark recognition. Damien currently works for MOLA.

Dawn Elise Mooney is an environmental archaeologist and associate professor in palaeobotany at the University of Stavanger, Norway. Her research explores the exploitation of gathered resources, especially plants, in Iron Age and Medieval Northern Europe. She is particularly interested in human interactions with coastal environments, and has published significant works on the use of driftwood and seaweed in the North Atlantic. Dawn is also co-chair of the EAA Community of Research on Wild Plant Resources (ARCHWILD).

Dirk Leder is a specialist in Palaeolithic Archaeology and has been employed as a postdoc at the Lower Saxony State Office for Cultural Heritage since 2019. His current project is applying a broad range of method like traceology, experiments, CT and MRI scans to evaluate hundreds of unpublished wooden objects from Schöningen 13-II4. This is a collaborative research project including colleagues from University of Reading, Göttingen University, and Greifswald University coordinated by the PI, Prof. Dr. Thomas Terberger.

Elie Pinta is an archaeologist specializing in the analysis of wooden artifacts, especially in ‘tree-less’ landscapes and coastal environments. More specifically, Élie’s research links compositional (wood taxa identification, tree-ring analysis, and isotopic biogeochemistry) and typo-technological methods (concept of chaîne-opératoire) to investigate the origins, transformation processes, and uses of wooden resources in the Medieval Norse Settlements of Greenland (10th-15th century) and the wider North Atlantic Islands. As a postdoctoral researcher (Fyssen Foundation, France), Dr Pinta is currently investigating wooden materials collected at L’Anse aux Meadows, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the first European settlement in North America, located in the northernmost part of Newfoundland, Canada.

Eva Francesca Martellotta is an Italian PhD candidate at the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution (ARCHE) -- Griffith University, Australia. She specialises in experimental archaeology and use-wear analysis on wooden and osseous materials. Her PhD research project focuses on the multipurpose nature of Aboriginal Australian hardwood boomerangs, in comparison with Palaeolithic bone retouchers in Eurasia.

Grzegorz is a professor at the Department of Prehistory, Institute of Archaeology, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland. He is a traceologist who specialises in research on the function antechnology of prehistoric stone, bone and wood artefacts, but also in experimental archaeology and broadly defined issues of the Middle Stone Age, with particular emphasis on studies of the function and spatial organisation of campsites from this period. Currently, he is the PI of the PARTS project, which focuses on building a comprehensive knowledge of the production and use of plant material products (wood and plant fibres) by the hunter-gatherer-fisher communities inhabiting the Eastern Baltic Lowland in the Middle Holocene.

Jens Lehmann has expertise as both a joiner and is a qualified architect (University of Hildesheim), with a focus on the preservation of historical monuments. He has decades of experience in professional archaeological excavation, serving as a technical manager at the Palaeolithic site of Schöningen (Germany). He is currently based at the Lower Saxony State Office for Cultural Heritage and since 2017 has worked on documenting and analysing the wood remains from the Schöningen Spear Horizon.

Koen Deforce is an archaeobotanist and palaeoecologist working at Ghent University and the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences. Koen studies human-vegetation relationships during the late quaternary period in NW-Europe, based on the analysis of pollen, wood and charcoal. A current project is making an inventory of wooden archaeological artifacts from Belgium. These data, together with wooden archaeological objects from other European countries, will be made available in an open access online database (www.woodan.org).

Kristof Haneca is a dendrochronologist and wood specialist at Flanders Heritage Agency, working on archeological wood, medieval construction timbers and occasionally on works of art. Kristof maintains manuals and guidelines for archaeologists and building historians on dendrochronology and radiocarbon dating, organizes training schools and provides coaching during fieldwork and sampling. Kristof’s main interests are chronological dating, provenance analysis, timber trade networks, forest history and wood species selection based on mechanical and physical properties.

Llorenç Picornell-Gelabert is an archaeobotanist specialised in wood and charcoal analyses. Llorenç has developed research from a multi-proxy perspective, combining anthracology, dendro-anthracology and ethnoarchaeology with the aim to better understand people and trees relationships, forest resources management and woodland dynamics over time. Llorenç’s archaeological work has focused mainly in prehistoric mediterranean islands (Balearics, Corsica, Sicily, Crete), and has also developed ethnoarchaeological studies on people and trees among African communities (Equatorial Guinea and Ghana). Llorenç is currently a Ramon y Cajal fellow at the ArqueoUIB research team of the University of the Balearic Islands.

Marta Alcolea Gracia is an archaeologist and palaeobotanist interested in human-plant-environment interactions from Palaeolithic to present day. Marta’s work focuses on the study of plant macro-remains that appear in archaeological contexts. The main tools Marta employs are charcoal and wood analyses by taxonomic identification, taphonomy alterations and calibre reconstruction using image analysis software. Her research has mainly focused on the inner areas of the NE Mediterranean Iberia in a diachronic perspective.

Dr. Marta Domínguez-Delmás is a tree-ring scientist specialising in wooden objects and structures from cultural heritage. Besides using dendrochronology to determine dates and provenance, her research focuses on the historic use of wood for structures, artefacts and art objects. She is working on improving methods to pin-point the provenance of historic timber, and non-invasive techniques to study tree-rings in artwork. She has worked on several international multidisciplinary projects, leading four of them as PI. She has made important contributions to European dendroarchaeology and demonstrates the power of combining archival sources with tree-ring research to gain knowledge about historical sites, ancient forestry practices, and environmental dynamics.

María Martín-Seijo is currently based at the Universidad de Cantabria (Santander, Spain). María's areas of research are in Archaeology and Archaeobotany, focused on the relationships between people and plants through the study of plant remains -wood, charcoal, fibres- recovered from archaeological contexts. María is particularly interested in the study of plant-based crafts, the technological know-how of past communities and their environmental involvement.

Mike Bamforth is a field archaeologist who specialises in the excavation, recording and analysis of archaeological waterlogged wood assemblages. He is interested in the transfer of technical knowledge as expressed through woodworking and the way past peoples interacted with wood and woodlands. Mike generally works in England, on sites ranging from the Early Mesolithic through to the post Medieval period.

Rob Sands is faculty at the School of Archaeology, University College Dublin. He has a special interest in material culture and technological innovation across the 1st millennium BC and 1st millennium AD. Rob's interest in wooden objects started with his PhD research on timbers. This focused on marks left by tools, process of construction, how blade edges left signatures unique to particular tools, and processes for underwater recording and digital analysis. Recently Rob has focused on wooden portable objects, notably from the Roman fort of Vindolanda, leading to an exploration of craft skill and skill acquisition.

Satu Koivisto is a researcher based at Museum Lolland-Falster in Denmark. She specialises in Mesolithic and Neolithic wetland sites and waterlogged organic materials. Current research includes Stone Age fishing traditions in the southern Baltic, and organic artefacts from the lake site of Järvensuo 1 in southwest Finland.

Thomas Terberger is Professor at the University of Göttingen (Germany), and senior researcher leading the Archaeology of Hunting and Gathering research division at the Lower Saxony State Office for Cultural Heritage. He is PI of the current project to record and analyse the wooden tools and macro-remains from the Palaeolithic site of Schöningen. He has also worked on other significant wood material culture, including the Shigir Idol.