Affiliated Scholars
Mark Lycett, Director of the South Asia Center at University of Pennsylvania
Dr. Lycett’s research interests include: Archaeology, historical anthropology, method and theory, analytical methods, colonialism, demography, historical and political ecology, environmental history, landscape ecology, biodiversity, conservation, Colonial Latin America, quantitative analysis, ceramic analysis, spatial Analysis, Western North America, South Asia.
mlycett@sas.upenn.edu
Jennifer Bates, Assistant Professor of Archaeological Science, Seoul National University, South Korea.
Dr. Bates is working on the LandCover6k project, the archaeobotanical remains from Kadebakele and other Southern India Neolithic – Early Historic sites and materials from the TwoRains project in the Indus Civilisation c.3200-1300BC. Her research uses archaeobotanical data to explore questions about the broader social, cultural and environmental contexts of how societies were internally organised, how villages and cities interacted during periods of urbanisation and deurbanisation, what happens when cultures meet and interact, and how people reacted during periods of climatic instability.
Chantel White, Archaeobotanical Teaching Specialist in the Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials (CAAM) of the Penn Museum
Dr. White’s research interests include: Neolithic and Bronze Age foodways; cooking and plant processing techniques; agricultural sustainability in prehistory; ethnoarchaeology; urban garden systems; Jordan, Turkey, Greece.
chantelw@sas.upenn.edu
Dr. Smriti Haricharan, Assistant Professor Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay
Dr. Haricharan’s research interests include Iron Age-Early Historic Archaeology, Popular perceptions and relationships with the past, Landscape Archaeology, Contemporary Archaeology, and Experimental Archaeology.
Ramya Bala Prabhakaran, Fulbright-Kalam Climate Fellow at University of Pennsylvania
Dr. P. Ramya Bala completed her Interdisciplinary PhD in paleoclimatology at the Centres for Earth and Ecological Sciences in the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, in September 2016. Ramya Bala is a Fulbright-Kalam Fellow. Her fellowship aims to conduct a direct evidence-based understanding of past climate and vegetation in the Holocene in a tropical dry forest in India, as part of the LandCover6k project. This project aims to study land-cover change across the globe that is induced by climate, natural causes, and humans for the Holocene epoch and deliver this information to climate modelers. Ramya Bala will be working on an extension of this project in India using stable isotopes and radiocarbon and also get trained in palynological techniques at the host lab during her fellowship.