Four weeks have passed since my last day in the office…and even more since my last lab work, how I miss those days! I have started to work in the Raindrops project team last December, and my contribution consists in exploring C4 plants management, thanks to the combination of experimentally controlled data with ethnographic evidence for the assessment of crop water availability. Particularly, my purpose is to investigate how C4 plant were cultivated in the past to contribute

We are privileged workers. We have always known it. We travel around the globe, we do research, we investigate, we meet cool people. Yet, under the present situation, we obviously make no exception and stay home. In these days, confined in my flat, I dream about staying in one of those places we visited doing ethnographic interviews, and I guess I am not the only one. I miss the luscious valleys of Tigray, where trees, green patches, and isolated houses combines into unexpect

May 13th, 7 p.m. We finally got there. After one of the shortest 20 hours trips of my life we finally got to Adigrat. Yes, I know… Where the heck is that? Well, think Africa, then go East, then find Ethiopia, and finally look up to Tigray, the northeastern region. There it is… Just about at the Eritrean-Ethiopian border! How exciting, isn’t it? Sure. Until you are actually there and about to start your fieldwork. It is difficult to explain. My fellow ethnoarchaeologists for s

While on holidays (yes, we all got to enjoy nice off-time with families during August! ;-) the research did not stop completely and, as a result, we came back to work with two nice surprises on our desks! First, the seminal publication of the project, with the results of the fieldwork that did set the ball rolling, is out in Antiquity! The paper explores the available literature on ethnography of rain-fed cultivation in arid and hyper arid drylands, concentrating on the Sahar

So, you know when you look at the PEOPLE page and you see that one missing picture right at the center of the page? We are looking to fill that in with an actual person's photo! If you are looking for a postdoc starting from September 2019, and you are an expert on stable isotope analysis in plants, look no further than EURAXESS. RAINDROPS is seeking to appoint a strong candidate for a 3 year full-time research position on stable isotope analysis in plants. The successful can

It has been two months since I arrived at ICRISAT. In less than one day I realised that this is a calm and green paradise inside India, nothing to do with the world outside! The campus is surrounded by fields, isolated from the chaos of the city, definitely the right place to open the mind and run experiments! As a PhD student of the RAINDROPS project I am working on the development of a methodology for the identification of past crops water availability in drylands. In ICRIS

Disclaimer: this entry is a very personal reflection on how I think archaeology is too often presented to the public, both general as well as the scientific community and what are the risks associated. These are mainly rambling thoughts I have been having for a while and are not associated to a specific particular case but are a reflection on several news that have appeared recently in the press. This is to say: if you are not interested in reading a somewhat confuse stream-o

The main aim of this first fieldwork is very much to organise future fieldworks. The targets of this trip are mainly two. On the one hand we need to find suitable locations for the ethnoarcaheological work; on the other hand we need to understand practical aspects for the isotope transect. For ethnoarchaeology, the idea is to contact some farmers who still cultivate millets without irrigation. From preliminary work conducted looking a satellite images, the best area for this

Next week I am going to Pakistan for the first project's fieldwork. Actually, it's three projects' fieldwork combined: RAINDROPS (keep reading the blog for more details), ModAgro and PaleoAsia. The three projects are very interrelated as they approach similar research questions from different perspectives and with overlapping, yet different chronologies that will en up covering from the Pleistocene to modern times. ModAgro (Modelling the Agricultural Origins and Urbanism in S

The first RAINDROPS event will be to co-host a one-day conference on Trends in Multidisciplinary Archaeology. This conference is part of the annual Archaeology day (Jornades de Arqueologia) organised by Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Department of Humanities and the Institute of History Jaume Vicens i Vives (IUHJVV). The event will take place on January 9th (9.30-18.00) in the Auditorium Mercè Rodoreda of UPF Campus Ciutadella. Attendance is free though space is limited. Here is t

Five months after submission (almost to the date) you get a communication through the participants portal. Subject: Initial information on the outcome of the evaluation of proposal submitted to the Call for proposal.... Heart stops for five millisecond and then starts beating furiously for the time it takes you to open the portal, sign in, retrieve and download the pdf and wait for the document to show up on your screen. And then fortunately it just takes a glance to see the