Braden Cordivari

30 October 2025

Congratulations to Madeleine Thirolle, the winner of the SAS Student Poster Award at the 11^th International Symposium on Biomolecular Archaeology (ISBA11 – August 26-29, 2025, Turin, Italy). Madeleine is a PhD student at the Institute of Genomics at the University of Tartu. Her poster “Metagenomic and proteomic studies of Stone Age anthropogenic birch tar samples” presented analysis of birch tar from three Estonian sites dated to the 9^th millennium BCE. Her research examined bacterial sources, microbial content, and eukaryote DNA, including remains from several animals, which together inform a reconstruction of life in the prehistoric Baltic.

Madeleine’s PhD project focuses on the analysis of anthropogenic birch tar, a new source of ancient DNA and proteins. Ancient DNA and protein analysis of birch tar is particularly valuable for reconstructing past health conditions, the diversity of oral pathogens, and diet since the quantity of human remains is limited for this period.

As part of the award, Madeleine will receive a cash prize and a one-year complementary SAS membership.

Congratulations, Madeleine!

Braden Cordivari

30 October 2025

SAS welcomes Jessica Giles as the newest Student Ambassador! Jessica Giles is a graduate student in the Master of Applied Anthropology program at Indiana University–Indianapolis. With a focus on bioarchaeology, her fieldwork includes excavations at Greenlawn Cemetery in Indianapolis and medieval funerary sites in Transylvania, Romania. She is currently working on her thesis which focuses on growth and health disparities of subadults in Indianapolis during the 19 th century, which earned her a prestigious fellowship from the Indiana University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Jessica brings over a decade of experience across museums, government agencies, and forensic units. She currently serves as an Archaeological Field Tech at Stantec and a Senior Laboratory Analyst at Indiana University–Indianapolis, where she conducts osteological analysis and advanced age-at-death estimation.

Braden Cordivari

16 September 2025

Welcome to Maria Isabel Guevara Duque, who joins SAS as a Student Ambassador! Maria Isabel (Maisa) is a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois Chicago whose research explores copper acquisition, consumption, and circulation in precolonial Ecuador. As an SAS Student Ambassador, she looks forward to advancing the use of archaeological sciences in Andean archaeology by showcasing how analytical techniques can deepen our understanding of ancient technological practices. She is especially excited to collaborate with researchers from around the world and to create opportunities for students and colleagues to engage with diverse analytical tools in an inclusive and supportive environment.

Braden Cordivari

08 September 2025

The SAS is delighted to announce Caitlyn Pallas as the newest Student Ambassador! This program is designed to engage students in professional development and outreach. Caitlyn is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Missouri working on the technology and production of Roman mortars. She is looking forward to organizing programs geared toward sharing tools for furthering research in all disciplines, particularly classical archaeology. Welcome, Caitlyn!

Caitlyn in her trench at the Gabii 2025 Field School, Italy

Braden Cordivari

15 June 2025

Congratulations to John Murray (Institute of Human Origins, School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University; Social Sciences Department, Glendale Community College), the winner of the EAG Laboratories-SAS Student Pilot Research Award! This award is designed to support the collection of preliminary chemical data for use in major funding applications and was newly launched in 2025. SAS is excited to see the results of John's research on silcrete and stone tools and is grateful to Eurofins EAG Laboratories for their support of this award.

“How does geochemistry vary with mineralogy across South African silcrete sources?”

This award will allow John to apply Scanning Electron Microscopy – Energy Dispersive X-ray Spectroscopy (SEM-EDS) to geological thin sections of South African silcrete to better understand how silcrete structure relates to variation in geochemistry. Silcrete was commonly heat-treated and used as a raw material for manufacturing stone tools in the Middle Stone Age of South Africa. Due to its formation processes, the structure and quality of silcrete is highly variable and not all sources respond to heat treatment in the same way. Thus, it is important that we understand the mineralogical structure and geochemistry of archaeologically relevant sources to determine how heat treatment influences these characteristics.

John’s research focuses on better understanding how Middle Stone Age humans heat-treated silcrete on the south coast of South Africa through experimental archaeology, lithic analysis, and machine learning. This research contributes to a long-standing debate surrounding the complexity of the method used to heat-treat silcrete which may have implications regarding human cognition, social learning and teaching, and possibly language. Also, it has provided new pathways to identify heated silcrete in the archaeological record that are non-destructive, quantitative, and field friendly.

Braden Cordivari

06 June 2025

We are very pleased to announce that the Journal of Archaeological Science (JAS) and Society for Archaeological Sciences (SAS) Emerging Investigator Award for 2024 has been awarded to Lasse Lukas Platz Herskind for the paper “A computational linguistic methodology for assessing semiotic structure in prehistoric art and the meaning of southern Scandinavian Mesolithic ornamentation”. Follow the DOI for more info: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2024.105969

The paper was selected as an outstanding example of transdisciplinary work, combining computational methods and Mesolithic non-figurative art with linguistics and semiotics. The study provides a novel approach for analysing ancient semiotic systems through art objects and proposes new methodologies for tackling concepts of symbolism, language and communication in prehistoric societies. The paper serves as a strong example of digital humanities, and has a wider impact on understanding intangible heritage and social connectedness in archaeological research.

Author’s comments

“I remain proud of this publication but am nonetheless overwhelmed by the positive feedback it has received. This computational linguistic approach is hopefully only the first in a series of interdisciplinary novelties to prehistoric art research, and it is my hope that fellow researchers will help me explore, improve, and test these ideas.”

Honorable Mentions

Due to very high number and quality of papers this year, the Award Committee decided to announce three Honourable Mentions for the SAS-JAS Emerging Investigator Award 2024:

1. Jasmine Vieri for the paper “Beyond baselines of performance: Beta regression models of compositional variability in craft production studies”, cf https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2024.106106. The paper was highlighted as an innovative example of a modelling-based approach for compositional data that can make a significant contribution for the chemical analysis of archaeological artefacts across different material classes.
   
2. Jean Rodier for the paper “Hammerscale and slag inclusions: New insights into metal supply during the early iron Age in Western Europe”, cf https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2023.105925. The paper was highlighted as a groundbreaking microarchaeological study of a type of material that is abundant but understudied, opening  new avenues for provenancing archaeological iron.
    
3. Li Kangkang for the paper “Multi-proxy investigations of Bronze Age diet and environment in the hyper-arid eastern Tarim Basin (Lop Nur), northwest China”, cf https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2024.106089. The paper was highlighted as a noteworthy multiproxy biomolecular research tackling the correlations of past foodways and adaptations with extreme environments. 

Congratulations to this year's award winner and honorable mentions on their fantastic contributions!