Michela Spataro

Dr Michela Spataro is the scientist for ceramics and stone in the British Museum’s Department of Conservation and Scientific Research. She uses a suite of archaeometric techniques to investigate the provenance and technology of pottery from the Neolithic period onwards. At the British Museum, she has worked on ceramics from all over the world, including Minoan, Mycenaean and other Eastern Mediterranean materials, Halaf, Bronze and Iron Age pottery from the Levant, New Kingdom and Nubian pottery from Sudan, and Sasanian material from Iran. As an archaeologist she has worked in many countries (e.g. Mongolia, Morocco, Romania, Italy); her fieldwork in Pakistan included ethnographic recording of traditional pottery production in the Thar desert. She is particularly interested in how potters learn and teach their craft and the origins of specialisation. She is an expert on prehistoric pottery from the Balkans, and has published a book on the Neolithic pottery of the Adriatic region and co-edited a volume on Balkan prehistory. Her next book will be about the social dimensions of pottery production in the early Neolithic Starčevo culture of the central Balkans.