Beatrice is a biomolecular archaeologist with a background in cultural heritage sciences. She specialised in ancient protein studies at the University of York, where she obtained her PhD in Archaeology (2010) and spent several years as a postdoc.
Beatrice is interested in the fundamental mechanisms underlying the diagenesis of biomolecules and the ways these can be used for obtaining information on the age, evolution and life histories of biomineralised tissues and organisms.
Since founding ArchaeoBiomics, she has broadened her research to encompass a wider spectrum of methods in archaeology, with a view to better understand the relationships between people and their environments in the past. She wishes to enable researchers from diverse backgrounds to pursue their research goals in her laboratory and with the support of her group.
Through her research and teaching in the Natural Sciences, Archaeology, and Sustainability Sciences, she tries to find new ways in which biomolecular archaeology can contribute to today’s environmental and social challenges.
Beatrice is the Principal Investigator of the AviArch ptoject.
Lisa Yeomans
Lisa Yeomans is an Associate Professor at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Having worked extensively as a field archaeologist, Lisa moved to Copenhagen in 2014 to research human-animal relations in the past with a view to understanding our impact on the natural world. Lisa’s work draws attention to the intricacies, causes and consequences of shifts in the entangled history of humans, animals and environments on a global scale. Lisa is responsible for leading the zooarchaeological research in WP1 as well as providing expertise in stratigraphical analysis of archaeological sites and guidance in archaeological photography.
Dan Chamberlain
Dan Chamberlain is currently an Ordinary Professor in Ecology at the University of Turin, Italy. Following a DPhil on Blackbird ecology at the Edward Grey Institute, Oxford, Dan spent sixteen years working for the British Trust for Ornithology, most recently as the Principal Ecologist for Climate Change and head of Population Ecology and Modelling. He moved to Turin in 2010 to predict impacts of climate change on communities of birds and beetles along elevation gradients in the Italian Alps. In a career of nearly 30 years, he has produced a large body of work on the ecology of birds in highly modified habitats, specifically farmland and urban areas. His current research addresses the impacts of environmental change on animal biodiversity, with a particular focus on alpine and urban ecosystems.
He will take a leading role in WP4 of AviArch, directing the modelling and hindcasting of species distributions and the development of trait-based approaches, in addition to providing ecological expertise in the interpretation of outputs from the whole project.
Gabriele Gattiglia
Gabriele Gattiglia is an Associate Professor of Archaeological Methods and Theory at the University of Pisa. He specialises in Digital Archaeology, focusing on Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, and Open Data, as well as Medieval, Post-Medieval, and Contemporary Archaeology. He leads the MAPPA Lab, which manages MOD (Mappa Open Data), the Italian repository for open archaeological data. Gattiglia is the Principal Investigator of the AUTOMATA Horizon Europe RIA project and has coordinated several significant projects, including the ArchAIDE Horizon 2020 RIA project, both related to AI applications in archaeology. His work in AviArch mainly focuses on AI applications for the recognition of bird bones in WP3.
Jan Dekker
Jan is a biomolecular archaeologist specialised in the study of ancient proteins. In 2025 he joined the ArchaeoBiomics team as part of the AviArch project. His part of the project will focus on method development for the extraction and analysis of proteins from eggshell, in particular the validation of new biomarkers for additional bird species. Jan started his studies at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands, where he obtained his BA and MSc in Archaeology. He then undertook a joint PhD programme at the University of York, the UK, and the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. His PhD project concerned the proteomic analysis of foodcrusts and focused in particular on establishing the accuracy and precision of protein-based taxonomic identifications from foodcrust.
Camilla Mazzucato
Camilla is an archaeologist and anthropologist specialized in the study of the Neolithic of Southwest Asia. Her research interests center on the Neolithic of Southwest Asia and include the investigation of social organization of Neolithic communities, the archaeology of kinship and of human-animal relations. She has extensive experience as a GIS Specialist for several major archaeological projects. For her PhD research at Stanford University, she applied Network Science methods to the study of the social arrangment of the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük (TR). She was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Copenhagen from 2021 to 2023 with the Project “Birds as a key line of evidence for human vulnerability and resilience to environmental shifts in a pre-agricultural context”. She joined AviArch in 2025, where she will lead WP5 and use archeological network methods to integrate and analyze the different datasets produced by the project.
Ramazan Parmaksız
Ramazan Parmaksız graduated from the Department of Prehistoric Archaeology at Istanbul University in 2021. During his undergraduate studies, he gained experience in zooarchaeology as an Erasmus exchange student at Groningen University in the Netherlands in 2018 and 2020. He completed his master’s degree in Geoanthropology at Istanbul Technical University in 2024. During his master’s program, he gained laboratory experience in Zooarchaeological Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS) at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Germany. His research interests focus on zooarchaeology, proteomics, and the role of avifauna in prehistoric societies.
He joind AviArch as a ERC doctoral student. For his thesis he will investigate bird management practices in early societies, spanning the Epipaleolithic to the Late Pre-Pottery Neolithic periods in Southwest Asia, with a focus on Central Anatolia, Southeastern Anatolia, and the Levant.
Katerina Carlotta Koukzelas
Katerina Carlotta Koukzelas has completed her master’s degree in Archaeology and Ancient History at the University of Turin in 2021, and has obtained her diploma from the “Giorgio Gullini” School of Specialization in Archaeological Heritage in 2024. She has gained considerable experience in the field of bioarchaeology (human and animal remains) and biomolecular archaeology (lipids and proteins) through her work both on the archaeological field and in the ArchaeoBiomics laboratory. She joined AviArch as a PhD student with her research on foodways and culinary practices in the Aegean during the Bronze Age, and their relation to social dynamics, as well as the translocation of exotic species.
