Team Member Role: Researchers

Dr. Eske Willerslev is an evolutionary geneticist. He is particularly known for sequencing the first ancient human genome and establishing the field of environmental DNA, where modern and ancient DNA from higher plants and animals are obtained directly from environmental samples. Willerslev has broad research interest in the fields of ecology and evolution. He started out as an environmental microbiologist, then moved into the field of invertebrate systematics, and later into mammalian population genetics and community ecology. Over the past [...]

Dr. Benjamin Shepard is an Adjunct Instructor in Anthropology at Los Angeles Pierce College. He received his PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2016. He has been a participant in the BAP since 2007. RESEARCH INTERESTS: Ritual and political dynamics in small-scale societies, mobility and social change, the political economy of burial ritual, long-distance exchange networks, Eurasian prehistory (focusing on Lake Baikal), history of archaeology, archaeology in public education

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Dr. Gunita Zariņa is senior researcher and head of the Bioarchaeological repository of institute of Latvian History of University of Latvia. Her research interests are related to demographics, nutrition, migration, health and quality of life of the ancient Latvian population, including formation and ethnology of the Latvian inhabitants and historical demography. She has published 2 monographs and about 170 scientific papers. In recent years she has focused on the study of the diet of the ancient Latvian population, using stable [...]

Dr. Ilga Zagorska (Dr.hist.) is a Senior Researcher and has a great deal of experience organizing archaeological excavations, giving lectures about Stone Age in Latvia and abroad, and participating in international conferences (last ones UISPP in Paris, EAA in Barselona 2018). She has participated in numerous international projects, including: 1) Technological Transfer in the processing of Mineral recourses in earlier times (Museum of Cultural history, Oslo, Norway – LU, IHL,  2015-2018; 2) Prehistoric Art: ritual,context and symbolism (Lithuanian Academy of [...]

https://www.dainst.org/mitarbeiter-detailansicht/-/person-display/14043 Dr. Mayke Wagner is Scientific Director of the Eurasia Department of the German Archaeological Institute and head of its Beijing Branch Office. She is specialist of Chinese and East Asian archaeology and PI of the several large projects. The most recent ones are “Silk Road Fashion: Vestimentary knowledge in central and eastern Asia from 2nd Millennium BC to 1st Millennium AD” focusing on technique oriented in-depth studies of garments preserved in arid eastern central Asia and their archaeological and [...]

http://soan.gmu.edu/people/dtemple3 Dr. Daniel Temple is currently an Associate Professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. His research interests include bioarchaeology; skeletal and dental biology; developmental stress; the biological and cultural aspects of growth and development; resilience theory, adaptive cycling, and persistent landscapes; memory and ontology; and hunter-gatherer mortuary practices. Dr. Temple has worked with hunter-gatherer mortuary remains from Japan, Alaska, Siberia, and Florida. His contribution to the Baikal Archaeology Project includes assessment of growth in non-surviving pre-adults, body size [...]

Dr. Pavel Tarasov is a Professor of Quaternary Sciences at Freie Universität Berlin. His research interests include pollen analysis, regional-scale reconstructions of Holocene and Pleistocene plant communities, quantitative pollen-based climate, tree cover and biome reconstructions, human environment interactions, and data-model comparison. His main research area is Eurasia, including Russia, Mongolia, India, China and Japan. https://www.geo.fu-berlin.de/en/geol/fachrichtungen/pal/mitarbeiter/akademischer-mittelbau/tarasov/index.html RESEARCH INTERESTS: Pollen analysis, Climate reconstruction, Biome reconstruction, Human-environment interactions

Dr. Rick Schulting is Professor of Scientific and Prehistoric Archaeology at the University of Oxford. He has had a long-standing interest in the Mesolithic and Neolithic of Western Europe, both in themselves, and in terms of the transition to farming. Recent and ongoing research is focused on improving our understanding of chronology, through the use of AMS 14C dating, and of palaeodiet and mobility, through the use of stable carbon, nitrogen and strontium isotope analyses. Another strong research strand involves [...]

Dr. Ian Scharlotta is an Alumnus of the University of Alberta and Baikal Archaeology Project member for over a decade. He is currently working with Applied EarthWorks in San Luis Obispo County, CA to help synthesize and contextualize analytical data gleaned from a series of data recovery projects in the region. The sites lie in a disputed cultural area with evidence of long-term complex hunter-gatherer interactions within the changing environmental circumstances of the entire Holocene. He recently completed a project [...]