I'm an archaeological researcher with a wide range of interests, from Neolithic Turkey to medieval northern Europe, and from human-animal relations theory to bioarchaeology and archaeological statistics. My main specialism is zooarchaeology - the analysis of animal remains from archaeological sites - and I'm increasingly interested in using zooarchaeological data to inform contemporary ecology.

My doctoral research looked at connections between herding practices and the development of settled communities in the Balkan Neolithic, particularly in Serbia. Following a year's sojourn in the US, studying the animal bones from Halaf-period Fıstıklı Höyük (Turkey) for Susan Pollock, I'm now back at Cambridge and working as a post-doc with James Barrett on biomolecular evidence for the (post)medieval fish trade. This is a big change of direction given my background in prehistory, but it's a sufficiently fascinating subject that I've started working on several extensions to the original project. I was recently invited onto the steering committee of the global History of Marine Animal Populations project on the strength of some of this work.

I've recently begun an additional project looking at the potential implications of archaeological data for contemporary environmental conservation and campaigning, with the fisheries research as the main case study. Over the coming year I will be interviewing representatives of NGOs and relevant public bodies and holding a series of seminars, to explore how environmental archaeologists can best design and disseminate their research in order to generate genuine impact in the modern world.

I'm also involved in a number of fieldwork projects. Since 2006 I've worked every summer at Çatalhöyük, Turkey, where I am the zooarchaeologist for the Chalcolithic West Mound excavations, and in 2010 I joined the Prehistoric Landscapes Across the Sava project for survey and excavation seasons in northern Bosnia. Previous years have seen fieldwork in Croatia, Greece, Scotland, France, and England.