Monica Nicolaides Ramsey (University of Cambridge, Marie Curie Research Fellow)
I am an environmental archaeologist who specializes in paleoethnobotany, specifically microbotanical analysis (phytoliths, starch and microcharcoal). My PhD, from the University of Texas at Austin, is concerned with Early to Middle Epipalaeolithic (23,000-14,500 cal. BP) hunter-gatherer adaptation and plant-use in the Eastern Levant throughout the climate fluctuations of the late Pleistocene. My current research investigates the development and intensification of human-environment interactions and the rise of plant-food production in the Southern Levant. Human niche construction activities’, including wild-plant resource management and resultant landscape modification, provide a promising way to consider changing hunter-gatherer plant resource selection and importantly, the wider cultural and environmental implications of such choices in the development of plant food production. Fundamentally, I am interested in how humans have always directly and indirectly created or engineered their environments. Indeed, it is a key adaptive characteristic and is central to human resilience and our unprecedented success as a species. Academia
Past Post-Doctoral Fellows
Christopher Ames (University of California, Berkeley, SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow). Academia
Kharaneh IV 