Dr. Mareike Stahlschmidt

Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Department of Human Evolution
Leipzig, Germany

Dr. Mareike Stahlschmidt is a geoarchaeologist and researches what sediments at archaeological sites can tell us about the people who lived there in the past. She studied Prehistory, Soil Science and Paleoanthropology at the Universities of Hamburg and Tübingen and graduated in Tübingen in 2014. In her PhD thesis she used microstratigraphic analysis to study how archaeological sites form and preserve over time. Afterwards she first held a 2-year post-doctoral fellowship at the University College Dublin, focused on reconstructing changes in fire use behaviours as a response to climate change. During this time, she also won a grant for a pilot study on the application of archaeogenetics to speleothems. She went on to become a post-doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, where she focused on the development of new approaches and tools in pyroarchaeology and on exploring the potential of environmental ancient DNA for archaeological research. She was just awarded an ERC Starting Grant on this latter topic, called “MicroStratDNA - Reconstructing Paleolithic Population Dynamics Using Microstratified Paleogenomics“.