About
As a specialist in the scientific study of the human material culture I am fascinated by the role of skills, technologies and objects in our relationships with each other and the environments in which we live. I completed my archaeological education at the University of Sheffield where I studied for ten years, training in the study of lithics, metals, glass, and, particularly, ceramics. I completed my PhD on some of the earliest pottery in Eurasia, dated to around 12,000 years BC and recovered from the temporary campsites of late Pleistocene hunter-gatherer communities in the Vitim Basin in Eastern Siberia. During my PhD and subsequently, through a series of postdoctoral research positions at the University of Oxford, I have worked and travelled across the continent of Eurasia, building up a varied profile of collaborative research. My active projects are focussed upon the emergence, spread and transformation of pottery and metallurgy in Eurasia, the monumentalization of pastoralist settlements and the relationships between humans and animals expressed in the leather clothing of the Scythian Period.