About

About me

I am currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Interdisciplinary Center for Archaeology and Evolution of Human Behaviour (ICArEHB) at the Universidade do Algarve, Portugal (view my ICArEHB profile page here). My research interests are lithic technology and landscape use in the Southern African Stone Age, with a particular focus on Middle Stone Age behavioural variability and past human adaptations to arid environments. I have led two projects in the Cederberg and Tankwa Karoo regions of South Africa studying surface lithic assemblages.

My PhD research at the University of Cambridge (2013-2018) investigated variability in lithic and landscape use behaviour in the Tankwa Karoo (Western/Northern Cape South Africa) supervised by Dr Philip Nigst and funded by an AHRC Doctoral Award. My Masters research at the University of Cape Town (2011-2013) studied Stone Age landscape use in the Olifants River Valley (Western Cape, South Africa), supervised by Prof. John Parkington.

Following the EU-funded TANKwA Project, I am now continuing my study of Nubian Levallois technology in other arid regions of the world with the project NuBIAN (Nubian technology, Behavioural Innovation and Adaptation. New perspectives on Middle Stone Age technological variability and population dynamics), funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT).

About TANKwA (funded by EU, 2020-2022)

The project TANKwA uses innovative digital archaeological methods to investigate human technological adaptations to arid regions during the Middle Stone Age – a critical period of early human anatomical and behavioural development. Specifically, this will focus on a new late MSA technological variant observed in the Tankwa Karoo region of South Africa which uses Nubian technology, a distinctive Levallois method of stone point production more commonly seen in MSA contexts in North Africa, the Levant and Arabia. Using cutting-edge digital Geometric Morphometric techniques, this research will establish a novel method for studying Nubian technology and lithic points, testing the hypothesis that this technology was an adaptive response to the challenges facing hunter-gatherers in an arid environment. The recently discovered open-air site of Tweefontein has a large artefact assemblage offering the ideal opportunity to characterise this technology, complemented by museum study of other South African Karoo sites. The novel approach applied will generate replicable quantitative data that allows the contextualisation of Nubian technology both in the southern African archaeological record and globally, establishing the first inter-regional comparison between Nubian technology in the Levant and South Africa.

Read about the project’s results on the EU Horizon 2020 page here

About NuBIAN (funded by FCT, 2022-2028)

Project ‘NuBIAN’ undertakes the first multi-regional comparative study of Nubian Levallois technology, using cutting-edge digital techniques to characterise and quantify different lithic strategies employed by past humans. Through the application of geometric morphometric analysis to lithic assemblages from five key regions of Africa, the Levant and Arabia, this research aims to: (1) develop a rigorous, testable, definition of Nubian Levallois technology that allows us to quantitatively differentiate it from other knapping methods, (2) conduct intra- and inter-regional comparison of assemblages from areas that each play an important role in early human development and demographic expansion, in order to (3) assess whether hypotheses of population dispersal, cultural diffusion or technological convergence can be supported between regions. The novel analytical approach and global scale of this research marks a significant step in facilitating inter-regional assemblage comparability that will advance debates on the origins and spread of Nubian technology, contributing to broader questions of what drives behavioural innovation, lithic variability and environmental adaptations that underpin our understanding of modern human origins.

So far this project has collected data from over 20 sites for inter-regional comparative analyses, with publications on the way.