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4 women and a destiny: researchers from IPHES carry out research stays in the United Kingdom

The aim is to develop research on different scientific fields such as lithic technology, zooarchaeology and archaeobotany  

Two of the researchers are Marie Skłodowska Curie fellows, the other two researchers have been granted by the Spanish Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte

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At the moment, 4 researchers from the Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social (IPHES) carry out in the United Kingdom with the aim of developing different lines of research related to lithic technology, zooarchaeology and archaeobotany.

Paola Garcia Medrano, after defending her doctoral thesis in 2011, began a new professional career stage thanks to a Marie Skłodowska Curie grant at the British Museum in London for the development of a research project entitled “Western European Acheulean Project, WEAP “(2017-2019)”. These grant mean a postdoctoral period of training and specialization in foreign research centers, which will bring new capabilities to the researcher and will complete her pre-doctoral training.

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Paola García

WEAP involves the development of a unified methodology that allows to compare equally the lithic technology of Western Europe, approximately 300,000 years ago, thus extending the knowledge obtained with the studied sites of the Iberian Peninsula, France and the United Kingdom. In addition, taking advantage of the emergence of new technologies in the documentation and statistical analysis of the data, she tries to overcome the local technological analysis to obtain a wider regional vision of use patterns. For all this, the stay of Paola García Medrano in London is complemented by the collaboration of three other centers: Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle (Paris, France), IPHES (Tarragona, Spain) and University of Bradford ( United Kingdom).

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Amèlia Bargalló

Amèlia Bargalló Ferrerons is investigating at the Institute of Archeology, University College London since 2017 with a Marie Skłodowska Curie grant. The project that develops is called PREKARN. The purpose of this research is to identify the technical characteristics of the lithic remains resulting from the apprentices knappers in order to track how this process is developed and its transferred to the archaeological record.

The PREKARN project combines experiments with modern humans, high resolution analysis of experimental and archaeological material and computational archaeology. Within the archaeological materials that are intended to be studied we find deposits as diverse as the lithic remains of Abric Romaní (Capellades, Barcelona) or those of Gran Dolina (Atapuerca, Burgos), among others, in order to obtain diachronic information about the learning process.

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Ethel Allué

Ethel Allué, an IPHES researcher, is carrying out 6-month stay at the Institute of Archaeology (University College of London) thanks to a grant Salvador de Madariaga from the Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte of Spain. At the Institute of Archaeology, Ethel Allué works with the Archaeobotany group led by Professor Dorian Q. Fuller. The purpose of the stay is to study the vegetation and uses of forest resources in tropical areas with charcoal assemblages of prehistoric and historical contexts in Sri Lanka. This is the first systematic anthracological study carried out on remains from this Asian country and will provide new data on environmental issues and on human behavior related to the successive occupations of Sri Lanka.

Rosa Huguet, an IPHES researcher, is carrying out a 4-month stay at the Department of Archaeology (University of Reading) thanks to José Castillejo’s grant from the Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte of Spain. There she works with Professor Robert Hosfield, a researcher whose main line of research is the study and reconstruction of the subsistence strategies of the first human groups that inhabited the average latitudes of Europe to the Lower Paleolithic.

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Rosa Huguet

The objectives of this stay are two: one of a research nature and another of a teaching nature. Regarding the first one, which intends to exchange knowledge about the differences and similarities of the subsistence strategies of human groups inhabiting northern Europe with those who lived in the more southern areas, as well as in the research methods used to obtain the data from which this information can be obtained.

The second objective is to know the university system and the transmission of knowledge in the United Kingdom. With this purpose, she participates in different academic activities within the Department of Archeology. This experience will enrich her teaching activity in the degree of Social Anthropology and Human Evolution of the Universtitat Rovira i Virgili (URV) and the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) of which she is a lecturer on Human Paleocology.