Personal Statement
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.

My current research centres on prehistoric mobile societies— hunter-gatherers and herding communities—across northern Eurasia, with a particular focus on the Sayan Mountains in Mongolia. I'm interested in the ways in which communities lived, how they adapted to the environment and how, as innovators, they changed the world around them.

Alongside my academic work, I manage the Department's Experimental Archaeology Research and Teaching Hub (EARTH) at Ness Gardens and co-direct community-led projects both in the UK and abroad. These projects— which focus primarily on heritage preservation and education— often use archaeology to bridge the gap between the humanities and sciences, creating new and engaging ways for young people to understand how research contributes to our understanding of both the past and present.

In partnership with the Mongolian Academy of Sciences and the American Mongolian NGO NOMAD Science, we launched the Heritage Guardians (Ov Khamgalaagchid) programme in 2023 — a project that aims to raise awareness of threats to cultural heritage, to inform the public about heritage policy, and to work with rural and urban communities to build connections with heritage, protect sites and monuments and explore opportunities to develop the heritage sector for the benefit of all.