Staff

Mariana Nabais is a post-doc at IPHES-CERCA as part of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant and from the State Research Agency of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through the Program Maria de Maeztu Unit of Excellence. Her current post-doc project “Neanderthal and Anatomically Modern Human interactions with small prey in Atlantic Iberia throughout the changing environments of the Pleistocene” focuses primarily on reconstructing human subsistence strategies through zooarchaeological analyses of mammals, birds, reptiles, molluscs and crustaceans.

Mariana holds a PhD in Archaeology from University College London, where she worked as a teaching assistant in Zooarchaeology and in Field Methods in Archaeology. Since 2006 that she has been participating in several research projects ranging from the Palaeolithic to the Roman Era in Portugal and Spain, and was the assistant direction of the excavations running in Downley (West Dean, UK) between 2014 and 2016. She has been directing her own excavation project in Portugal since 2018. Mariana has also worked as a field archaeologist and as a zooarchaeology specialist for several commercial units in Portugal between 2008 and 2021.

Her research has been funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC, UK), the London Arts and Humanities Partnership (LAHP, UK), and Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT, Portugal). She has a record of international peer-reviewed publications, book chapters and archaeology/zooarchaeology reports. She is currently a review editor for Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology, she is a board member of ICOMOS Portugal, and member of several archaeological associations like ICAZ, SAA and AEA. Mariana has extensive experience in public engagement activities in Portugal and the UK, and her work has been featured on several media platforms on Portuguese national TV, radio and press, and recently on BBC World Service.