Andarnik Gyonjyan

Andarnik Gyonjyan graduated from the Ar as a veterinarian. He started his scientific career at the Laboratory of Zoology of Vertebrates at the Scientific Center of Zoology and Hydroecology of NAS Armenia in 2008. Since 2008, he studies animal bone remains from burials and archaeological monuments from the Bronze and Iron ages. Currently, he is a researcher at the Laboratory of Zoology of Vertebrates, finishing his PhD research themed “Hunting and animal husbandry in the Bronze and Iron Ages in North-western Armenia”. Moreover, Andarnik is involved and actively works with mammal species in Armenia, studying their ecology and comparatively analyzing their distribution data with the findings from the archaeological sites. 

Research interests: Zooarcheology, Zoology, Mammology, Archaeology, Zoogeography, Paleoanthalogy, Paleology. 

TransCause project: As an Armenian team member, Andranik conducts the collecting of raw materials as one of the aspects of a comparative study of biological evolution. 

Artur Petrosyan

Artur Petrosyan graduated from the Faculty of Culture at the Armenian State Pedagogical University in 2005 obtaining a degree of a Museologist and Conservator of Historical Sites. In 2007 Mr. Petrosyan graduated from the Department of Archaeology and Ethnography at the Faculty of History of Yerevan State University obtaining an MA degree in Archaeology and History. He continued his education at the Faculty of Cultural Heritage and Environment at the University of Milan (Italy) studying the Methodology of Archaeological Research in 2008, then he did another course of Lithic Industry and Experimental Archaeology at the Department of History and Cultural Heritage of the University of Siena (Italy) in 2010. From 2007 to 2010, Artur did his PhD education at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of NAS RA. Since 2007, Artur Petrosyan works at the same Institute as a Researcher.

Since 2005, as archaeologist he has participated in a number of archaeological expeditions in Armenia, Italy (Calvatone, Sassofortino) and UAE (Vadi al Hello). Currently he is the co-director of Armenian – Italian, Armenian – Japanis, Armenian – Chinese, Armenian-Russian joined expeditions in Kotayk, Vayots Dzor, Ararat, Lori and Armavir regions (Armenia). The scope of his specific professional interest is the research on the Archaeological Method and Theory, Neolithic Archaeology, Lithic Industries, Lithic analysis and organization of technology, Prehistory of Armenia, Southern Caucasus and Near East. Petrosyan is a member of Is.I.P.U - Istituto Italiano di Paleontologia Umana Anagni (Rome, Italy), I S M E O - Associazione Internazionale di Studi sul Mediterraneo e l'Oriente (Rome, Italy), Individual member of International Council of Museums (ICOM/ICMAH - International Committee for Museums and Collections of Archaeology and History), Individual member of International Council on Monuments and Sites - ICOMOS. He is an Archaeological Expert at the National Bureau of Expertise, RA NAS.

Dr. DelphineVettese 

Dr. Delphine Vettese has a Ph.D. in zooarchaeology from the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle of Paris, France. Her thesis focused on the butchery tradition of Neanderthal groups. She is currently a Postdoc Research Fellow at the University of Ferrara (Italy) and is part of the Group I+D+I EvoAdapta (the University of Cantabria in Santander, Spain), which focuses on the Neanderthal/Sapiens transition. She had wide experience in subsistence behavior and taphonomy interpretations of archaeological sites, mainly in European Middle and Upper Paleolithic sites. Her skills include experimental archaeology, especially in anthropic marks (percussion marks, cutmarks, and retouchers) and spatial analyses, applied at the level of the site and of the bone. She has participated in several archaeological excavations in Southwestern Europe (France, Spain, and Italy). Dr. Vettese is responsible for the archeozoological analyses of the faunal assemblages uncovered in the project.  

Dr. Ellery Frahm

Dr. Ellery Frahm received his BA (1999) from Grinnell College and his MA (2002) and PhD (2010) from the University of Minnesota, where he was also a Research Associate in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences as well as a Postdoctoral Associate and an Assistant Professor (Temporary) in the Department of Anthropology. He was a Marie Curie Experienced Research Fellow at the University of Sheffield (2012-2014) and a Research Fellow at Harvard University (2015-2016). Currently, he is a Research Scientist (Faculty) in the Department of Anthropology at Yale University, where he has been the Director of the Yale Initiative for the Study of Ancient Pyrotechnology since 2017.

Dr. Frahm has conducted and published research on four continents – Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America – spanning nearly half a million years of human history. A unifying theme of his research is elucidating how human groups made use of natural resources distributed across the landscape, how they responded to challenges within their environments, and how the resulting behaviors influenced connectivity and, in turn, opportunities for the spread of technological innovations and social changes. Since 2010, his work has largely focused on the Caucasus, specifically Armenia and Georgia, although his other projects span from China to Kenya.

Gor Kaloyan

Gor Kaloyan graduated from Armenian National Agrarian University as a veterinarian. He started his scientific career at the Laboratory of Zoology of Vertebrates at the Scientific Center of Zoology and Hydroecology of NAS Armenia in 2008. He left and was back to academic work in 2019. As a junior researcher, he studies mammal species, specifically small vertebrates. Currently, he works on his PhD research themed “Eurasian otter ecology and distribution in Armenia”. Moreover, Gor is actively involved and works with reptile and lizard species in Armenia, studying their ecology, distribution data and movement patterns of this taxon.

Research interests: Zoology, Mammology, Herpetology, Animal behaviour

TransCause project: Gor is involved in finding and collecting the raw materials for a comparative study.

Dr. Hugues-Alexandre Blain

Dr. Hugues-Alexandre Blain has earned his PhD (2005) at the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle de Paris from a background in Geology and Biology at the University of Basse-Normandie (Caen, France). He is currently Leader Group of “Human Paleoecology of the Plio-Pleistocene” at the Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social (Center of Excellence Maria de Maeztu). As a specialist in fossil amphibians and reptiles, his research applies on a taxonomic approach as his main primary-data paleoecological proxy to reconstruct the climate and landscapes of the Early and Middle Pleistocene (2.6 to 0.12 Ma). For that, he has adapted and developed a strong methodology, combining other proxies, to infer quantitative paleoclimate parameters from numerous archaeo-paleontological localities, participating in several field seasons at Spain, France, Italy, Morocco, Serbia, Armenia, among others. With this track, Dr. Blain is currently testing and unifying the different methodologies based on small vertebrates, sharpening paleoclimate estimates based on continental records, in order to contrast climate changes on land, biodiversity loss and hominin dispersal models. As a collaborator of the TransCause project, he will co-supervise the PhD of Dominik Lukas Rogall, entitled: “Herpetofauna and microfauna analysis in Armenia as proxy for past human occupation”.

Research interests: Amphibians, Reptiles, Pliocene, Pleistocene, Holocene, Paleoclimatology, Paleoecology, Ambiental Archeology, Modern Osteology, Biotic Responses to Past Climate change, Extinction.

Dr. Maria Zicos

Maria Zicos received her BSc (2014) and MSc (2015) from the University of St Andrews. She did her PhD at Queen Mary University of London and the London Natural History Museum through a London NERC DTP studentship (2017-2024). She is now working as an ERC-funded postdoctoral researcher at the Natural History Museum in London.

Maria’s main research interest involve population dynamics of mammals through time, in particular in the shifting environments of the Quaternary and in the present. She has a background of ecology, population modelling and ancient DNA. She uses ancient DNA methods on museum and archaeological specimens to reconstructs fluctuations of genetic diversity through time in mammal populations, either in the distant past or present with the aim to conduct conservation genomic analysis on species facing conservation threats today.

Masha Krakovsky

Masha Krakovsky completed her B.A and M.A degrees in the Institute of Archaeology of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem with an emphasis on Middle Paleolithic period. Her M.A thesis was conducted under the supervision of Prof. Erella Hovers. The study's aim was to test a model of territoriality through the study of the Levallois triangular blanks from a detailed technological perspective. Blanks from the assemblages of Amud (sub-units B1, B2 and B4) and Kebara (units XI and X) caves were used for the case study.

Throughout the years Masha has participated in numerous excavations of various archaeological periods, primarily prehistoric, in different capacities. She currently works at the Prehistory Branch in the Israel Antiquities Authority, as a specialist in lithics of various periods and as a field archaeologist.

Her prime interests are in lithics and cultural transmission of knowledge during the Middle Paleolithic.

Dr. Paloma Vidal-Matutano 

Dr. Paloma Vidal-Matutano received her BA (2011), MA (2012), and PhD (2016) from the University of Valencia, Spain. Since 2017, she has carried out several postdoctoral stays in Spain, France and Switzerland in the framework of different regional (APOSTD), national (Juan de la Cierva-Formación and Juan de la Cierva-Incorporación) and European (Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions) postdoctoral fellowships.

Her research is focused on the analysis of plant macroremains (charcoal and wood) from arcaheological sites. She combines the analysis of firewood gathering strategies among hunter-gatherer groups from different geographic contexts (Spain, Italy, Montenegro, Armenia, Morocco) with archaeobotanical analyses (charcoal and desiccated wood) from Prehispanic contexts of the Canary Islands. My interest in obtaining meaningful data regarding wood acquisition strategies has guided my research towards implementing experimental methods and the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS).

Research interests: Palaeolithic Archaeology, Archaeobotany, Wood, Charcoal, Palaeoenvironment, Palaeoclimate, Palaeoeconomy, Experimentation, Taphonomy, Wood technology, GIS.

Dr. Selina Brace

Dr Selina Brace received her B.Sc. from University College London (UCL) in 2004 and her PhD from Royal Holloway University of London (RHUL) in 2010. She was a postdoctoral researcher at RHUL until 2013, then a Wellcome funded postdoctoral researcher at the Natural History Museum (NHM) London until 2017. Since 2017 she has been employed as Principal Researcher in ancient DNA at the NHM.

Dr Selina Brace is an ancient DNA specialist with >10 years of experience working with degraded DNA samples. She specialises in DNA recovery from museum and palaeontological specimens and is an expert in ancient DNA extraction and NGS sequencing coupled with downstream analyses. Her work addresses questions relating to taxonomy and evolutionary relationships, also responses to past events (climatic and human mediated) and colonisation and extinction events. She has used ancient DNA at the species and population levels to explore past histories and structure of various taxa including insects, extinct and endangered large and small mammals, and humans.

Tsovinar Hovhannisyan

Tsovinar graduated from the Pedagogical University of Armenia with a Master's degree in Biology. The topic of her Master's thesis was “The ecology of Long-legged buzzard (Buteo rufinus) and breeding preferences in Armenia”. Starting in 2011, she works at the laboratory of Zoology of Vertebrates of the Scientific Center of Zoology and Hydroecology of NAS Armenia. Tsovinar has more than ten years of work experience with raptor species starting as a volunteer at the Batumi Raptor counts (2008, 2009) and working as a Biodiversity expert (2012,2017) in the eastern forested areas of Armenia. As a PhD applicant at the laboratory of Zoology of Vertebrates, she studied Lesser Kestrel (Falco naumanni) ecology, population trends impacted by climate change and movement patterns of the species in Armenia. 

Research interests: Zoology, Ornithology, Climate change, Behavioural Ecology, Feeding Ecology.

TransCause: Tsovinar is the lead of the Armenian team researching birds of prey and their feeding ecology.