Jayde Hirniak, School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, 900 Cady Mall, Tempe, AZ 85281
Jayde Hirniak is a PhD student in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University. Her research interests include modern human origins, timing and impact of volcanic eruptions, archaeological site formation processes, and advancing field survey methods. She has worked on various archaeological projects in Italy, South Africa, Greece and Kenya. Her current work focuses on using cryptotephra, microscopic glass shards from a volcanic eruption, to better date and correlate archaeological sites in northern Italy and South Africa.
Rachel L. Johnson, Department of Anthropology, Tulane University, 6823 St. Charles Ave., Dinwiddie Hall 105, New Orleans, LA 70118; This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Rachel Lee Johnson is an 4th year archaeology PhD student at Tulane University and a 2016 recipient of the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (NSF-GRFP). Prior to coming to Tulane, Johnson earned a B.A. in anthropology and a B.S. in geology from the University of Pittsburgh (2016). Her dissertation research seeks to evaluate the economic and social relationships between the Andean highlands and the Upper Amazon during the Initial Period (1700-800 BCE) and Early Horizon (800-300 BCE) through the reconstruction of trade networks via material sourcing and the application of archaeometric techniques, like ceramic petrography, portable x-ray fluorescence (pXRF), and instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA). At a broader level, she is interested in questions surrounding the development of social complexity and in the social and economic processes relating to craft production, trade, and material consumption.
AJ White, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley; This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
AJ White is an anthropology PhD candidate at UC Berkeley who has conducted geoarchaeological research in Jordan, Egypt, Vietnam, and the United States. He is primarily interested in using geochemistry to link archaeological and paleoenvironmental data sets to better understand human/climate relationships in the past, including at Cahokia, Illinois during the Mississippian Period (c. 1000-1400 CE) and Kharaneh IV, Jordan during the early Epipaleolithic (c. 20,000-18,000 BP).
Tekla Cunningham, MSc student, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Manitoba, Canada
Tekla Cunningham specializes in working with stable isotopes to understand diet, paleodemography, mobility, and climate in the past. For her honour's thesis, she is investigating how the Little Ice Age affected the Caribbean using in the oxygen isotope composition of tooth enamel. She was the recipient of a National Science and Engineering Research Council Undergraduate Research Award (NSERC-USRA) to investigate migration in a Roman site in Serbia and has worked at the Manitoba Isotope Research Facility (MIRF).
