Marta Dal Corso is a postdoctoral researcher in the field of archaeobotany and palynology, interested in the understanding of plant cultivation and use in prehistory and of the relationships between human activities and natural environments. She is currently working at the Institute for Prehistoric and Protohistoric Archaeology at Kiel University (Germany), where she has been assistant to the chair of Environmental Archaeology and taught palynology and phytolith analysis among other classes.
After her bachelor and MA studies at the University of Padova (Italy), she carried out her PhD study in Kiel, on the environment at the time of the Late Bronze Age Terramare civilization in the Po Valley, in Northern Italy. Since some years, she works as research fellow within the CRC 1266 in a project focused on the Copper Age Cucuteni-Tripyllia (or Tripolye) groups in Ukraine and Moldova, where the reconstruction of economic and environmental conditions is necessary to understand the developments related to the earliest large settlements in Europe.
She still investigates the European Bronze Age, with the study of routine activities in southern alpine pile-dwellings (within the cluster of excellence ROOTS) and with the study of the earliest millet finds in Ukraine and adjacent areas in their cultural and economic contexts. A forthcoming study with the DEI-Amman (Jordan), already funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation, will concern the preliminary investigation of the environment at Tall Zira’a in northern Jordan. These interdisciplinary research projects stem from international collaborations and brought to several publications, as author and editor. They include the book “How’s life? Living conditions in Europe during the 2nd millennium BCE” published with Sidestone. She actively participated in the organisation of conference sessions and workshops and is currently following the organisation of the 12th International Meeting for Phytolith Research.
Wiebke Kirleis is professor of environmental archaeology/archaeobotany at Kiel University, Germany. She is deputy director of the Collaborative Research Centre ‘Scales of Transformation: Human–Environmental Interaction in Prehistoric and Archaic Societies’ (CRC 1266, financed by the German Research Foundation/DFG) and a member of the Cluster of Excellence ‘Roots’ at Kiel University. As an archaeobotanist, she is interested in all kinds of plant-related human activities, be they subsistence strategies or food processing, with their socio-cultural implications, as well as the reconstruction of human–environment interactions in the past. Geographically, her research areas span from northern Europe all way to Indonesia.
