Dr Maria Guagnin
I combine rock art research with landscape archaeology and climatic change
My research interests include population dynamics and settlement patterns in marginal environments and across periods of environmental change. I have considerable fieldwork experience in Libya, Western Sahara, and Saudi Arabia, as well as in Europe. Most recently I have directed the first excavation of a Neolithic site with faunal remains in northern Arabia.
My PhD at the University of Edinburgh was entitled ‘From Savanna to Desert: Animal Engravings in the Changing Prehistoric Environment of the Wadi al-Hayat, Libyan Sahara’. Between 2014 and 2017 I was a Postdoctoral Researcher on the Palaeodeserts project at the University of Oxford and at Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, and I currently hold a Dahlem Research Fellowship at Freie Universität Berlin. My research is focussed on rock art research, with a particular focus on the relationship between the depicted animal species and the environment and landscape experienced by the engravers or painters. Archaeological sites I work with are often threatened by agricultural expansion, looting or vandalism and I have developed methods to record and quantify damage to sites.
Keywords
Levant, Arabia, Sahara, Holocene climatic change, Neolithic, Bronze Age, Landscape Archaeology, Rock art, GIS
Contact
Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East & North Africa, School of Archaeology, 2 South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3TG
