As a part of the European Research Council grant HYRAX, the Palaeoenvironments and Palaeoclimates Research Team (PAL), Institut des Sciences de l’Evolution (ISEM) are inviting applications for a 36-month PhD studentship focussed on the analysis of fossil pollen records from rock hyrax middens (stratified accumulations of urine and faecal pellets) from the Namib Desert, Namibia (cf. Chase et al., 2009; Scott and Woodborne, 2007). The goal is to use fossil pollen from rock hyrax middens in the Namib Desert to determine how Africa’s southwestern low-latitude climates and environments have changed in response to global and regional scale earth system variability over the last 50,000 years.

Research activities:1) Use fossil pollen to determine the environmental history and dynamics at a series of sites from the Namib Desert of Namibia, along Axis A (Figure 1).2) Use statistical analysis and vegetation models to produce quantitative estimates of climate parameters from fossil pollen data at each site. 3) Assess the spatial and temporal variability of environmental change in the region during the last 50,000 years as evidenced in aggregate fossil pollen records. 4) Contextualise the obtained data within the fullest survey of existing palaeoenvironmental data.5) Compare the findings with the latest simulations from GCMs to both evaluate the model simulations, and to explore the climate system dynamics that are most likely to account for the variations observed in the palaeoenvironmental record. 

Fieldwork : At least one major expedition to the Namib Desert to collect samples.

Applicants should submit: 1) a cover letter that highlights their skills, experience, and the fit between this opportunity and their research directions, 2) a curriculum vitae, and 3) the names, email addresses, and phone numbers three references. Please email all materials and/or questions to Brian Chase (Brian.Chase@univ-montp2.fr) with the subject line:  “HYRAX PhD2”.

Best wishes
Verushka

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dr. Verushka Valsecchi
Institut des Sciences de l’Evolution de Montpellier (UMR 5554)
Université Montpellier 2, Bat.22 cc061
Place Eugène Bataillon 
34095 Montpellier cedex 5
France

Phone: +33 (0)4 67 14 33 76 
Fax: +33 (0)4 67 14 40 44
e-mail: verushka.valsecchi@univ-montp2.fr
www.hyrax.univ-montp2.fr

The Geoscience Institute of the University of Mainz and the Satellite Remote Sensing Group of the Max Plank Institute for Chemistry will fund a 3-year PhD stipend for a student to work on archaeological remote sensing.

The student will carry out research into the origins and detection of soil-surface reflectance spectra anomalies above archaeological remains through a combination of field research, experimentation and numerical modelling.

Ideal candidates will have good physics skills with some background in earth science, soil science or geoarchaeology. Knowledge of remote sensing will be an advantage but is not a prerequisite.

Potential candidates should email with a CV.

David Jordan
Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz
Archaeological Prospection Research Group
Institut für Geowissenschaften
Johann-Joachim-Becher-Weg 21
D- 55128 Mainz

INFORMATION FOR PROJECT DOCTORAL STUDENT, “EARLY URBANISM IN PREHISTORIC EUROPE ?: THE CASE OF THE TRIPILLYE MEGA-SITES”

 

 

SUMMARY OF STUDENTSHIP

 

·      Title: Remote sensing in the Tripillye group, Ukraine

·      A three-year Full-Time studentship, funded by the AHRC, to be held at the Durham University Department of Archaeology;

·      Joint supervision by Professor T. J. Wilkinson and Dr. John Chapman; working with Ukrainian colleagues (Dr. Mikhail Videiko, Kyiv) and the Project’s Post-Doctoral Research Assistant;

·      Starting Date of Studentship: negotiable but latest 1^st October 2012;

·      Stipend: £ 13,590 per annum plus full Home / EU fees;

·      Eligibility: Home or EU students with a good first degree and an excellent Masters degree;

·      Method of Application: please contact Mrs. Helen Wood (Helen.wood@dur.ac.uk);

·      Closing Date for applications: 29^th February 2012;

·      Interviews: late March 2012.

 

 

 

PROJECT SUMMARY

 

The Tripillye - Cucuteni culture of Ukraine, Moldova and North East Romania (5000 - 2700 BC) has been termed "Europe's last civilization' - a late flowering of 'Old Europe' at a time when settled village life, advances in gold and copper metallurgy and vivid and varied material culture had come to an end a millennium or more earlier in most other regions of South East Europe. Although Gordon Childe introduced Tripillye to mainstream Western archaeology in the 1920s, the publication of most site monographs and articles in local languages has limited knowledge and the impact of Tripillyan discoveries to a small group of specialists. This has led to the neglect of the most striking aspect of Tripillyan practices - the development of a series of mega-sites, covering 200 - 450 ha, which are the largest sites in 4th millennium Europe and as large as the Early Bronze Age city of Uruk (Mesopotamia). The sheer size of these 'mega-sites' not only prompts questions of the complexity of social structure(s) necessary to sustain such settlements, and the logistics and long-term planning needed to provision them but also makes them very hard to investigate. After 2 decades of excavation, Ukrainian colleagues are currently unable to sequence the houses on a single mega-site by scientific dating, preventing us from working out the population size at any given phase of the site occupation and hindering attempts to elucidate the sequence of mega-site growth, floruit and collapse. Currently, we can neither place mega-sites in a micro-regional or regional settlement context nor understand their human impact on the forest steppe landscape. Our response to these research issues was the creation of an inter-disciplinary research project, jointly organised by Durham University (Chapman) and the Kyiv Institute of Archaeology (Videiko). Our preliminary summer 2009 field season enabled a field test of the methods proposed to understand the 250-ha. mega-site of Nebelivka, midway between Kyiv and Odessa. Geophysical prospection of 15ha of the site enabled the recognition of over 60 burnt structures in rows or streets, 18 of which were sampled by hand coring to depths of 0.80m to extract burnt house daub. The plant remains inserted into the daub can be directly dated by the AMS method, thereby providing a timeline for each individual houses. The aim is to recover 100 AMS dates from different parts of Nebelivka, enabling a sequencing of the whole settlement and the modelling of mega-site growth. Excavation of one complete burnt Tripillye house by the Ukrainian team in 2009 provided comparable 14C samples of other materials (bone, seeds, pottery). Initial fieldwalking in the environs of Nebelivka suggests that the land near the mega-site may have been devoted to cultivation; but much more fieldwalking in a 10-km radius is needed to provide insights into the nature of the local settlement structures and their social meanings. Peat deposits were identified to provide a regional vegetation history, with which to compare the local histories of mega-site environmental impact as recorded in nearby alluvial sequences. These fieldwork strategies will be enhanced by the analysis of satellite imagery to assess the amount of disturbance to mega-sites through earth-moving; the existence of crop-mark sites within the Nebelivka micro-region; and the variability in mega-site plans through time and across the whole Tripillye distribution. The research strategy of focussing on three different spatial levels - site, micro-region and macro-region - provides a platform for the integration and interpretation of much fresh data which has a high potential for answering the three crucial issues raised by Tripillye mega-sites: what are the details of a well-sequenced mega-site?; how was the provisioning of such large sites managed across the landscape?; and can we detect a trajectory towards local, European urbanism?

 

 

THE DOCTORAL RESEARCH

 

The proposed PhD thesis will assess the potential for the recovery of plan information for Tripillye mega-sites and other, smaller Tripillye sites from satellite imagery, as well as supplying regional settlement context, land use potential and possible palaeo-environmental change in the study region (25 x 25 km) around the Nebelivka mega-site.

 

Almost 200 Tripillye sites over 10 hectares in size are known from Ukraine and Moldova (Videiko 2007). Dating and contextual information for all of these sites has been summarised in the "Encyclopaedia of the Tripillye Culture" (Videiko 2004), with locational information accurate to within a segment of village territory. The sites represent all phases of the Tripillye culture (5000-2700 BC) and provide an archive of settlement history. However, the restriction of remote sensing, whether from the air or through geophysical prospection, to only 15 sites provides an opportunity for a broader investigation of long-term changes in settlement planning. Verification of known settlement plans, concerning the issue of the movement of soil from mega-sites from the 1970s, will make use of sequences of satellite images from the 1960s onwards.

 

The absence of land-use map cover for Ukraine and Moldova means that the most effective way of recovering this information is through satellite imagery. Field checking of current land-use capability will be used to fine-tune the reconstructions of land-use from satellite images for the Nebelivka micro-region. An assessment will be made of two forms of landscape change: natural changes to hydrological networks and prehistoric management of water resources.

 

The student will undertake research using remote sensing tools and field visits, and s/he will also be or will become a period specialist in Eastern European archaeology. By embedding the research within both landscape and East European archaeology, the research student will be able to contribute to the rapidly developing field of study of cultural landscapes.

 

The doctoral student's main contribution is the provision of all information relating to the project from satellite imagery. The overall aim of the project is a deeper understanding of Tripillye mega-sites, their origins, development and demise. A core part of the thesis involves the re-evaluation of the corpus of Tripillye sites in Ukraine and Moldova through the production of site plans for a much wider range of settlements than is currently available. A full picture of the evolution of settlement planning and its diachronic variability will constitute, in itself, a major research result for Tripillye archaeology, as well as providing the broad settlement context for the more detailed investigation of the Nebelivka micro-region. The 'tacking' of research between the macro-regional and the micro-regional levels will stimulate new research questions at each level which require further research at the other level.

            The PhD research in the Nebelivka micro-region makes a fundamental contribution to the overall project through the analysis of land-use capability and the identification of settlement and landscape changes as well as possible water management residues. This research complements the intensive, systematic fieldwalking planned for the micro-region and provides key data for the interpretation of the fieldwalking results in terms of the inter-relations between artifact discard and land-use potential.

            One of the most important logistical issues for a mega-site such as Nebelivka, with possibly more than a thousand occupants, was the secure provision of water for drinking, cooking and household production (pottery-making, textile production, house-building, etc.). We propose the investigation of this issue by an evaluation of changes in the palaeo-hydrological network and through an attempt to identify traces of prehistoric water management near the mega-site. Preliminary perusal of CORONA satellite images purchased for the project indicates traces of palaeo-channels in the micro-region - traces that require field investigation for reliable dating. The identification of (as yet undated) earthen dams near a Tripillye mega-site in the Vinnitsa province in 2009 has raised the question of Tripillye water management; the construction of dams would have been well within the capabilities of a mega-site population. Ground checking of any such traces revealed on satellite imagery will confirm or reject this notion.

 

The proposed PhD research forms an important part of the overall research, but is also regarded as a stand-alone topic, with the potential for the production of significant results for Tripillye archaeology.

 

Work progress will be documented through the project website, the bi-annual reports to the Management Committee, conference presentations and through publications.

 

The Durham Archaeology Department has an outstanding research culture, which is very supportive to doctoral candidates. The large cohort of over 50 PhD students means that there is thriving activity and interchange of research views, not least in the research group‘Landscapes of Complex Societies’, and research clusters dealing with satellite imagery and Balkan prehistory. These informal networks are enhanced by formal supervision meetings (once every month with the joint lead supervisors, once termly with the 2nd and 3^rd supervisors, as well as annual Departmental doctoral reviews. There is also the opportunity to give research seminars in the weekly postgraduate series, organised by the students, as well as to join in the annual 'research conversations' on two or three themes p.a., also organised by the students. There are excellent computing facilities in the Informatics Lab, where several PhD students are working with remote sensing, research space for PhDs and extensive library resources relevant to the research topic. Durham's Language Centre will be able to offer basic courses in Russian, and there will be language assistance available from the PI and the PDRA.

 

KEY SKILLS

 

1.     A good first degree (1^st / II.1 or equivalent) and preferably a Distinction at Masters level.

2.     Experience and training in the manipulation, processing, analysis and interpretation of satellite imagery (ideally to include CORONA, LANDSAT and more recent high resolution imagery (e.g. Quickbird, GeoEye, etc.) as well as archaeological data bases and GIS.

3.     A good understanding of archaeological settlement patterns and palaeo-environmental reconstructions.

 

DESIRABLE SKILLS

 

4.     A knowledge of the prehistory of Eastern Europe.

5.     Experience of archaeological fieldwork

6.     Knowledge of a Slavic language (especially Russian)

 

 

 

 

Investigating Ancient Proteins in Mineralised Tissues Using Liquid Chromatography Isotope Ratio Mass Spectrometry

 

Recent advances in Liquid Chromatography Isotope Ratio Mass Spectrometry (LC/IRMS) have enabled the isotopic analysis of amino acid fractions in proteins providing the potential for more detailed interpretations, smaller samples to be used, and better sample purification and quality assurance, especially in heavily degraded samples.

 

The goal of this PhD project is to apply LC/IRMS techniques to investigate the use of ancient proteins trapped within mineralised tissues (such as bone, tooth enamel and mollusc shell) for isotopic analysis and palaeoenvironmental interpretations.  The project involves the development of novel extraction techniques and instrumental chromatographic methods for the isotopic analysis of carbon in the amino acids and their application to archaeological materials.

 

The candidate would ideally have a good academic background in archaeological science, geochemistry or biochemistry, although candidates from other disciplines would be considered.

 

Contact Dr Colin Smith for further details

La Trobe University

Victoria 3086 Australia

Phone: +61 3 94796575

Email: colin.smith@latrobe.edu.au

http://www.latrobe.edu.au/humanities/about/staff/profile?uname=C4Smith

 

Funding for would be for 3.5 years at $22860

 

Applications are invited for the NERC-recognised MSc in Quaternary Science for the session 2011-12.  Taught jointly between Royal Holloway, University of London and University College London, both leading interdisciplinary research centres in the field of Quaternary Science, the degree programme offers comprehensive and flexible postgraduate training, with the academic emphasis being on the time-dependent processes affecting environmental change. Expertise within the groups covers geochronology, diverse palaeoenvironmental proxies (diatoms, pollen, ostracods, beetles, chironomids, mammals), sedimentology and stratigraphy, human evolution, tephrochronology and palaeoclimatology amongst others, as well as a range of technical skills such as micromorphology and stable isotope analysis.  The degree programme can be taken full-time over one year or part-time over two.  For full details of the degree programme, please visit http://www.gg.rhul.ac.uk/MScQS/ <https://owa.rhul.ac.uk/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.gg.rhul.ac.uk/MScQS/>  or contact the Programme Director, Professor Danielle Schreve (Danielle.Schreve@rhul.ac.uk <mailto:Danielle.Schreve@rhul.ac.uk> ; ++ 44 1784 443569).

From the University of Kiel:

Vacancies

Kiel offers a unique research environment at the interface between Humanities and Natural and Social Sciences with the presence of a Graduate School in the field of “Human Development in Landscapes” and two Excellence Clusters: “Future Ocean” and “Inflammation at Interfaces”, all three funded by the German Excellence Initiative. The Graduate School “Human Development in Landscapes” www.uni-kiel.de/landscapes) at the Christian Albrechts-University in Kiel, Germany, invites applications for:

1 PhD grant in Geophysical Prospecting

for initially for 21 months (subject to allowance, the grant can be extended for a total of three years). The grant will start on 01st of February 2011.

Project description:

The objective of the PhD project is to develop a non-destructive prospecting method for exploring the inner structure of large tumuli of up to 200 m diameter and some 10 m height. The prospecting approach is essentially based on 3D seismic measurements including P-, S- and surface waves and complemented by other geophysical methods such as geoelectric sounding. The prospecting method will be applied to the large Hellenistic tumuli of Bergama, Turkey, the ancient city of Pergamon. The project will be performed in cooperation with the German Archaeological Institute (DAI), Istanbul.

Required qualifications:

• Diplom or M.Sc. in Geophysics, or M.Sc. in Geoscience with a major in Geophysics,
• experience in the acquisition, digital processing and interpretation of seismic data,
• familiarity with computing and programming.

The selected doctoral student is expected to have his/her main residence in Kiel or immediate surroundings and take actively part in the academic activities at the Graduate School.

Applications including a curriculum vitae, copies of credentials, two letters of reference and a motivation letter can be submitted until 10th of January to:

Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Rabbel,
Institute of Geosciences
Christian-Albrechts-University
Otto-Hahn-Platz 1
24098 Kiel, Germany.
wrabbel@geophysik.uni-kiel.de

The Sainsbury Research Unit (SRU) at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK, welcomes applicants to its Masters and PhD programmes; scholarships are offered towards fees and living costs.

Anthropological, archaeological, art‐ historical and museological perspec‐ tives are used in the study of the arts and material culture of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, past and present.

See attached leaflet.