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Dr. Jean-Luc Houle
Department of Society, Culture, Crime, & Justice Studies
Western Kentucky University |
Jean-Luc is the project’s senior co-director. He is an anthropological archaeologist whose research interests focus on the social and ritual construction of landscapes and the sense of territoriality among mobile pastoralists, as well as on human-environment interactions and how all this relates to the development of complex societies in Inner Asia. Particularly, his interests and methodological foci include: the origins and development of complex societies, landscape archaeology, regional settlement pattern studies, household archaeology, quantitative and spatial analysis, nomadic pastoralist socio-political organization, ethnoarchaeology, and ritual practices. His recent edited volume – Mobile Pastoralist Households: Archaeological and Ethnoarchaeological Perspectives – brings together the work of archaeologists engaged in mobile pastoralist household research in different regions of the world to highlight the importance of household studies and the utility of both archaeological and ethnoarchaeological approaches in understanding mobile pastoralist household formation, continuity, and adaptation to environmental, social, economic, and political change.
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Dr. Jamsranjav BayarsaikhanInstitute of Archaeology, Mongolian Academy of Sciences
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Dr. Bayarsaikhan is the project’s co-director (PhD 2016, National University of Mongolia). He specializes in understanding Bronze Age cultures, pastoral societies, and monumental archaeology in Mongolia. Specially, his work explores the origin, timing, and meaning of ancient ritual practices and stone carvings from the Deer Stone culture – and their implications for continental Eurasia. His research has explored early animal domestication, Bronze and Early Iron Age subsistence, and the material culture of steppe empires like the Xiongnu and the Mongol Empire. His latest book, Deer Stones of Northern Mongolia, was recently published by the International Polar Institute and Arctic Studies Center of the Smithsonian Institution. He is also a strong advocate for the preservation and protection of Mongolian tangible cultural heritage.
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DR. Oula SeitsonenArchaeologist and
geographer University of Oulu, Finland |
Oula is an archaeologist and geographer working at the University of Oulu. He has done research on the archaeology of pastoralist societies in Mongolia, East Africa, and Fennoscandia, and specializes in lithics, GIS, and remote sensing applications in archaeology. Since 2006, he has also been involved in research on the archaeology and heritage of the German military presence in Finnish Lapland during the Second World War. His recent monograph "Archaeologies of Hitler's Arctic War" (Routledge 2021) is the first one in Finland dealing with the WW2 materialities. His most recent work concerns the archaeological applications of airborne laser scanning (LiDAR) and machine learning, domestication of reindeer in Sápmi, the heritage of northern mining and conflicts in Lapland and Svalbard, and pastoralism in Mongolia.
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Natalia is a geoethnoarchaeologist at the Institute of Natural Products and Agrobiology of the Spanish National Research Council (IPNA CSIC, Spain), where she leads the BIOMARQ Laboratory. She is also affiliated with the University of California Davis (USA). With a PhD in Natural Sciences (University of Kiel, Germany, 2018), she has over fifteen years of experience working as a geoarchaeologist on prehistoric sites across Africa, Europe, and Asia. Her research examines how past human communities adapted to diverse ecological settings, managed domesticated animals, and shaped cultural landscapes through mobile and pastoral lifeways. She employs an interdisciplinary approach that combines the micromorphology of soils and sediments with biomolecular techniques to recover microcontextual traces of domestic activities. These methods provide insights into palaeoenvironmental conditions, seasonality, animal diet, and broader socioeconomic strategies, helping to reconstruct patterns of human–environment interaction in ancient societies.
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Dr. SARAH PLEUGER-DreibrodtZooarchaeologist
University of Edinburgh |
Sarah is a zooarchaeologist affiliated with the University of Edinburgh, where she got her PhD. She did her Undergraduate in Pre- and Protohistoric Archaeology at Kiel University (2014) before specializing in her Master’s (2017) in zooarchaeology. She gained years of experiences in the identification and recording of non-human animal remains. With a focus on multispecies’ communities and land use she has been involved in several international projects. She has worked in Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan as well as the Balkans and Northern Europe. Her PhD project (funded by the Gerda-Henkel-Foundation) focused on early pastoralist multispecies communities in Eastern Mongolia and beyond.
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DR. FRANCESC C. CONESA
Archaeological remote sensing
Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) |
Francesc is a research fellow at the Institute of Natural Products and Agrobiology, Spanish National Research Council (IPNA CSIC, Spain) and the Landscape Archaeology Research Group, Catalan Institute of Classical Archaeology (Spain). He leads the Landscape Archaeology and the Cultural Landscapes and Heritage at Risk Laboratories. His work explores how cultural landscapes are shaped by the interaction between natural processes and long-term human activities, with particular attention to land-use strategies, ecological footprints, and the protection of endangered heritage. By integrating historical cartography, aerial and drone imagery, Earth Observation data, and automated feature detection, he conducts diachronic analyses to monitor landscape change, document at-risk archaeological contexts, and support digital recording and inventory efforts. He also investigates historical and conflict-related contexts and employs digital humanities tools to combine archaeological and historical datasets, ultimately contributing to the revalorization of vulnerable cultural landscapes and the preservation of traditional ecological knowledge.
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Lee is a consultant on the project. He gained his undergraduate degree in Archaeology in 2007 (Exon), before obtaining an MSc in Environmental Archaeology and Palaeoeconomy (Sheffield) and an MA in Cornish Studies (Exon). He is a freelance zooarchaeologist and ethnoarchaeologist at zooarchaeology.co.uk. His PhD research focused on the vertebrate taphonomy of urban environments. He is a fellow of the Zoological Society of London and a member of several other academic and professional organizations. Lee's research interests center around paleoecology, palaeoeconomy and pastoralism, themes which feature in his research projects in sub-Saharan Africa as well as current ones with this project.
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