Dr Henny Piezonka

Henny Piezonka (PhD, Free University Berlin, 2010) has been a Junior Professor for Anthropological Archaeology at Kiel University, Germany, since 2016. In May 2023, she was appointed University Professor for Prehistoric Archaeology at the Free University Berlin, Germany.

Her research and teaching focuses on the archaeology and anthropology of mobile hunter-gatherer and herder societies in North Eurasia and beyond. It covers three main, interconnected areas: hunter-gatherer diversity, technological innovations such as pottery as a source for socio-economic reconstruction, and Neolithisation pathways. While much of her work deals with the Stone Age, she also conducts ethnoarchaeological work in collaboration with indigenous hunter-fisher-reindeer herder groups in Western Siberia.

As one of the PIs of the Kiel Cluster of Excellence “ROOTS – Social, Environmental, and Cultural Connectivity in Past Societies” she has been studying the dynamics of social inequalities and the entanglement of domestication, diet and diseases. In the Collaborative Research Centre “Scales of Transformation: Human-environmental Interaction in Prehistoric and Archaic Societies” she works on theoretical approaches to transformation. In a project funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation, Piezonka and her team investigate roles and perception of abandoned urban sites within the Mongolian nomadic society at the interface between archaeology and cultural anthropology.