Dr Michela Spataro is the scientist for ceramics and stone in the British Museum’s Department of Conservation and Scientific Research. She uses a suite of archaeometric techniques to investigate the provenance and technology of pottery from the Neolithic period onwards. At the British Museum, she has worked on ceramics from all over the world, including Minoan, Mycenaean and other Eastern Mediterranean materials, Halaf, Bronze and Iron Age pottery from the Levant, New Kingdom and Nubian pottery from Sudan, and Sasanian material from Iran. As an archaeologist she has worked in many countries (e.g. Mongolia, Morocco, Romania, Italy); her fieldwork in Pakistan included ethnographic recording of traditional pottery production in the Thar desert. She is particularly interested in how potters learn and teach their craft and the origins of specialisation. She is an expert on prehistoric pottery from the Balkans, and has published a book on the Neolithic pottery of the Adriatic region and co-edited a volume on Balkan prehistory. Her next book will be about the social dimensions of pottery production in the early Neolithic Starčevo culture of the central Balkans.
Martin Furholt is Professor at the Institute of Archaeology, Conservation and History at the University of Oslo, Norway. Before he was working as Research Fellow and Lecturer at the CAU Kiel.
His main research interests are the social and political organisation, mobility and community composition, local and regional social networks of Neolithic and Bronze Age communities in Southeast Europe, Central Europe, and Northern Europe. He conducted his Phd research on Baden Complex materials in Poland and Czech Republic, and his Habilitation thesis on the Neolithic and Chalkolithic of the Aegean Region.
He is currently conducting fieldwork on 6th millennium Neolithic settlement in Slovakia and Serbia, and publishes papers related to the ongoing 3rd millennium migration debate in Europe.
