Research group members and contact information
Kristiina is the PI of the project. Her research interests are human-animal relations, zooarchaeology and bioarchaeology. She gained her PhD from the University of Helsinki in 2008 (Dissertation titled “Archaeology of wings: Birds and people in the Baltic Sea region during the Stone Age”). Since then, she has studied, e.g., the zooarchaeology of the earliest urban phase of the city of Helsinki, the chronology of Iron Age cairns, and the Holocene history of the fauna in North-East Europe. She has participated in several projects, such as projects studying the mystery of the Iron Age water burials in Levänluhta and Käldamäki, and the early history of the Finnhorse. In recent years, her research has focused on the application of various biomethods to study human-non-human relationships, especially based on Stone Age mortuary materials.
Address:
Department of Cultures
University of Helsinki
P.O Box 59
00014 University of Helsinki
email:
Tuija works in the Animals Make Identities project as a postdoctoral researcher investigating microarchaeological hairs, fibres and feathers deposited in burial sites. This information will be used in building a comprehensive picture of human-animal interactions in the past, as reflected in Mesolithic burial sites. Tuija worked as a PhD student in the Nature in arts, culture and history: Temporal sedimentations of landscape and the diversity of nature project in 2015–2018 and she completed her PhD thesis Between skins – Animal skins in the Iron Age and historical burials in eastern Fennoscandia in 2019. After graduating, she has investigated fur finds from the famous 11th century Eura matron burial site in Eura, Southwest Finland, and worked in the Interdisciplinary research strategies of biological cultural heritage – Surveying, archiving, analyzing and sharing historical DNA from Finnhorses project. Tuija has a passionate interest in human-nonhuman interactions, microarchaeology, bioarchaeology, fibre research, landscape research and spatial information.
Address:
Department of Cultures
University of Helsinki
P.O Box 59
00014 University of Helsinki
Phone:
+358-50-5541818
e-mail:
Johanna’s work in the project focuses on spatial data analysis, statistical analysis and data management. She graduated with a master's degree in archaeology from the University of Helsinki in the spring of 2019 and began her postgraduate studies in the autumn of 2019. The topic of her dissertation is GIS analyses in archaeological research. In addition, she has studied geoinformatics and forest ecology at the Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry. She conducted archaeological fieldwork during her undergraduate studies and has been involved in several different fieldwork projects. In addition to spatial data, surveying technology and archaeological fieldwork, Johanna is interested in the historical interaction of humans and nature.
Address:
Department of Cultures
University of Helsinki
P.O. Box 59
00014 University of Helsinki
email:
Rebekka joins the Animals make Identities project as a PhD student after graduating with a master’s degree in Archaeology at Kiel University in summer 2020. Building upon her previous research on how tooth dentine sampling strategies for isotope analyses impact interpretations of weaning events, Rebekka’s PhD research focuses on the individual and communal dietary habits of humans from Yuzhniy Oleniy Ostrov (Lake Onega, Russia) via sequential stable carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis of tooth dentine.
During her graduate studies Rebekka conducted stable isotope analysis associated with investigating the emergence of pastoralism in Central Asia and the Neolithic in Europe. She also led zooarchaeological analyses at the Neolithic settlement of Vráble (Slovakia) and has extensive experience excavating in Jordan, Slovakia, and Germany. Her main interest lies in the investigation of socio-cultural concepts in past societies and human-environmental interaction through the use of bioarchaeological analyses.
Lars Larsson graduated in 1978 with a PH.D. at Lund University which included the early Mesolithic settlement by a now ancient lake in central Scania, southernmost part of Sweden. He continued with research of the Middle Mesolithic in the same part of the country. He was appointed professor at the Department of archaeology, University of Lund, in 1984 and has been Professor Emeritus since 2012. He has carried out extensive field work at a lagoon with large Late Mesolithic sites including occupation layers and a significant number of burials. Larsson has also conducted excavations in Portugal and Latvia of Mesolithic settlements and mortuary practices as well as Middle Palaeolithic settlements in Zimbabwe and South Africa. The research has also included Neolithic settlement and megalithic tombs in Sweden and Portugal. An extensive effort has also been focused on a large settlement from the Late Iron Age in southernmost Sweden.
Mari is an archaeologist and bioarchaeologist affiliated at the University of Tartu as a Research Fellow. Being interested both in the biological and cultural aspects of past peoples she tries to bridge humanities and natural sciences in her research, by applying the methods of archaeology, osteology, archaeothanatology but also biochemical archaeology (with a focus on dietary stable isotopes) to reconstruct past life and death ways. After obtaining her PhD at the University of Tartu and Kiel University (CAU) in 2016 she has continued to study past death ways in Eastern Baltic from different prehistoric periods.
Mari is one of the members of the newly established Archemy group (https://archemy.ee/). Currently she is involved in a project aiming at establishing a stable isotope baseline for prehistoric Estonia. Since 2017 she is leading the transdisciplinary collegium of archaeology, genetics and linguistics at the University of Tartu (https://www.agl.ut.ee/) to initiate transdisciplinary cooperation. Since 2020 she is also the PI of the digital humanities project „The Ethnic History of Estonian Peoples in the light of new research“ at the Department of Archaeology in University of Tartu.
Link to Mari´s research: https://www.etis.ee/CV/Mari_T%C3%B5rv/eng?lang=ENG
Karen Hardy is an ICREA research professor at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain. Her research interests lie in the pre-agrarian world. Specifically, she studies pioneer populations, human adaptations, use of land and sea-scapes and exploitation of wild plants as food, medicine and raw materials. Materials extracted from ancient dental calculus provide direct access to biographical details and paleoenvironmental information; this is particularly useful for earlier Palaeolithic periods where the evidence for plant use is very limited. She has developed a multianalytical approach to the analysis of dental calculus that combines chemical compounds and microfossils and has recovered evidence for use of plants in the Lower and Middle Paleolithic as well as later periods. Much of her research is also focused on the human use of the Atlantic coastline, specifically in West Africa and North West Europe