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.
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.
Dragana Filipović is currently a member of the Collaborative Research Centre 1266 at the Institute for Prehistoric and Protohistoric Archaeology, Kiel University (Germany). There she carries out archaeobotanical investigations, including the analysis of plant remains from Neolithic and Bronze Age sites in central and northern Europe. She coordinated the Millet Dating Program of the CRC 1266.
Previously she worked as an independent researcher in Belgrade and then as a research associate at the Institute for Balkan Studies of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, where she led the implementation of archaeobotanical investigations in Serbia, conducted analyses and published the results, offered teaching and field and laboratory training, designed and participated in archaeological public outreach. She completed bachelor and master studies in archaeology at the University of Belgrade (Serbia), MPhil at the University of Nottingham (UK) and DPhil in archaeobotany at the University of Oxford (UK).
Her main field of interest is the social, technological and environmental context of plant production and consumption in the past. She has been involved in a number of international research projects (including the Çatalhöyük Research Project and several ERC-funded programmes) and excavations in Turkey, Serbia, Portugal, Slovakia, and Germany.
