People
Core team
David Orton
Principal Investigator
Archaeology, York
Nathan Wales
Archaeogenetics
Archaeology, York
Ele Green
PDRA in archaeogenetics
Archaeology, York
Eric Guiry
Stable isotope analysis
Anthropology, Trent
Sam Presslee
ZooMS analysis
Archaeology, York
Alice Rose (from Feb 2024)
PDRA in stable isotope analysis
Archaeology, York
Pen Holland
Population modelling
Biology, York
Michelle Alexander
Stable isotope analysis
Archaeology, York
Daan Jansen
PhD student in history
History, York
Advisory Board
The core team are supported by an extensive panel of international experts in relevant fields.
Steve is interested in long-range trade, culture contact and communication in Viking-Age Europe, which he accesses through typological and biomolecular analysis of artefacts.
Selina is a biologist who works with ancient and degraded DNA to investigate species-level and evolutionary processes. Her research centres on the use of genetic information from museum specimens to understand taxonomic and evolutionary relationships, population structure and history, and the ecological impact of past events.
Sophy is a biomolecular archaeologist who uses scientific techniques such as ancient DNA (aDNA) analysis and stable isotope analysis to explore human and animal lifeways within the archaeological past. She has a particular interest in human-animal interactions from early prehistory through to historical time periods.
Thomas is a zooarchaeologist whose research focuses on the origins, spread and evolution of anthropogenic animal species over the last 15k years, via integration of zooarchaeology with the latest in morphometrics and molecular studies. He is currently working on new methodological approaches to early animal domestication using bone functional morphology and epigenetics.
Monica H. Green, PhD, is a historian of medicine specializing on pre-modern Europe and global infectious diseases. She is the author of numerous studies, most recently (with Robert Hymes and Carol Symes), New Evidence for the Dating and Impact of the Black Death in Asia (Leeds, UK: Arc Humanities Press, 2022).
Dawn is a medieval archaeologist and historian who has published widely on the society and cultures of early medieval England and the Viking Age. Her expertise lies in interdisciplinary research: integrating historical and archaeological evidence, and humanities-based approaches to the past with those drawn from archaeological science.
Greger is interested in human-animal interactions and ancient genetics. He has worked on questions of domestication and dispersal in various vertebrate species, notably including pigs, dogs, rabbits, and chicken.
A Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of St Andrews, Christos Lynteris has pioneered the field of the anthropological examination of zoonosis, with his current research examining rats as plague and leptospirosis vectors from historical and ethnographic perspectives.
Jason Munshi-South is a professor of biology at Fordham University in New York, USA. His research group is widely interested in the ecology and evolution of urban wildlife. The group has completed a number of studies on urban rodents in particular, including efforts to reconstruct a global phylogeography of extant brown rat populations.
Roos van Oosten is assistant professor in Medieval and Urban Archaeology at Leiden University. She has broad research interests reflected in numerous publications on diverse topics: sanitation management, the textile industry, cemeteries and burial practices, historical cooking, ceramics and environmental archaeology.
Dr. Puckett studies the evolutionary genomics of mammals (particularly bears, rats, and chipmunks) through a phylogeographic lens. Her current focus on functional phylogeography links unique phenotypes to their underlying genomic architecture, then identifies the demographic history of the variant and its (dis)concordance with the species history.
Peter Sarris is Professor of Late Antique, Medieval, and Byzantine Studies at the University of Cambridge. His areas of research interest include the economic history of late antique and early medieval West Eurasia, and in particular the Justinianic Plague (or 'first pandemic').
Boris Schmid is theoretical biologist, specialized in modeling disease ecology and epidemiology. He has been working on many of the zoonotic aspects of plague since 2010. Key questions include how and where the disease persisted in the wild, and what made the medieval plague epidemics in humans so much worse than the global third pandemic.
Adrian's group focuses on infection and immunity, applying a comparative biology approach to a number of topics. They have a strong interest in using the past to understand interactions between hosts and pathogens. Examples include work on molecular archaeoparasitology (particularly enteric pathogens) and studying infection and immunogenetics in past populations of livestock species.