I am a computational archaeologist and assistant professor in Near Eastern archaeology at the University of Copenhagen. My research uses data science and ecological modelling to investigate the world’s first farming societies in prehistoric Southwest Asia. I also develop research software and open data that supports open science in archaeology. I have active field projects in eastern Jordan, focusing on desert archaeological survey, and have previously worked in Iran, Oman, Ukraine, and Bulgaria.
I am currently working on sampling early cropping systems as part of the Ancient Environment Genomics Initiative for Sustainability (AEGIS) and as one of the lead maintainers of XRONOS, an open data infrastructure for archaeological chronology.
Recent activity
Talk
2026-04-03
Abstract Ecological niche models, also known as species distribution models, are widely used by ecologists to quantify the relationship between the environment and the geographic extent of an organism (Sillero et al. 2021). Conceptually similar to ‘predictive modelling’ in archaeology, they involve training a model from known occurrences of the organism and a set of relevant environmental variables at those locations. The trained model...
Poster
2026-04-01
Abstract Computational archaeologists have benefited immensely from our field’s embrace of open data and open science approaches. One of the principle domains in which this has been applied in recent years is chronometric data. Comprehensive compilations of radiocarbon dates have become available for many parts of the world in the last decade and, as natural next step, there are now several initiatives to collate...
Poster
2026-04-01
Abstract In November 2022, the microblogging service Twitter (now X) was acquired by billionaire Elon Musk, triggering the first of several exoduses of its users. Amongst those who left the site for other platforms, or who simply stopped using it, were archaeologists and other scientists. ‘Science Twitter’ had been a prominent venue for scholarly communication on social media, providing a platform for researchers to...
Paper
2026-02-03
Abstract This paper presents the first continuous, spatially-explicit reconstructions of the palaeodistributions of 65 plant species found regularly in association with early agricultural archaeological sites in West Asia, including the progenitors of the first crops. We used machine learning to train an ecological niche model of each species based on its present-day distribution in relation to climate and environmental variables. Predictions of the potential...
Talk
2025-11-11
Abstract Archaeologists have amassed substantial quantities of lithic artefact and technological data from Epipalaeolithic and Neolithic sites in Southwest Asia over the past century, and although several large large catalogues were compiled in analogue format in the past (Hours et al., 1994; Schyle and Uerpmann, 1996) this data has thus far featured relatively little in pan-regional analyses with notable exceptions (Kozłowski and Aurenche, 2005;...
