Ioannis Oikonomou

Ioannis Oikonomou holds a BA in Archaeology and Art History from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and an MPhil in Archaeological Science from the University of Cambridge. As a student, he has been involved in several excavations of prehistoric and historical-era sites in Greece. He is interested in Geoarchaeology, Archaeological Science and Theory, with particular emphasis on the study of past societies and populations through the examination of their depositionary record.

His MPhil dissertation, titled as ‘Deciphering Site Formation Processes and Human Activities at the Neolithic Lakeside Settlement of Dispilio: A Micro-Geoarchaeological Approach’, supervised by C.A.I. French (University of Cambridge), is a recent example of his work. As a PhD researcher of the TransCause project, he will focus on the geoarchaeological and multi-proxy examination of Middle Palaeolithic caves and open-air sites from the Southern Caucasus/Armenia. The utilisation of an array of micromorphological, chemical, and sedimentological techniques, as well as the study of phytoliths, will allow the integration of hominin activity within its sedimentary, spatial, and palaeoenvironmental context, followed by insights about the mode of occupation. His PhD will be supervised by Dr. A. Malinsky-Buller (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Dr. D. Friesem (University of Haifa), and Dr. S. Gur-Arieh (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München).