Team
Umberto Lombardo
Umberto is a physical geographer who studies the events and processes that shaped the Amazonian landscape during the Holocene. His interests include neotectonics, fluvial geomorphology, paleosols, pre-Columbian agriculture, plant domestication, settlement patterns and the region’s earliest hunter-gatherer occupations. He is leading DEMODRIVER (ERC-COG), where his team is investigating the early human presence, landscape modifications and environmental change of Llanos de Moxos – Bolivian Amazon
Kate Dudgeon
Kate is an environmental archaeologist specialising in phytolith analysis. She is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the DEMODRIVERS project at ICTA-UAB, where she is currently building a new reference collection of plant material from the Llanos de Moxos, Bolivia. She is also optimising phytolith extraction and slide mounting techniques for the digital scanning of archaeological phytolith samples
Albert Gaitan Roca
Albert is an archaeologist specializing in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Remote Sensing, currently pursuing a PhD in Dremodriver at ICTA and the Department of Prehistory. His primary research revolves around the spatial analysis of Forest Islands in Bolivia, with a focus on various levels of morphological and landscape study. His research is enhancing our understanding of the relationship between ancient human activities and the formation of landscape features in the Amazon.
Lautaro Hilbert
Lautaro is a PhD Archaeologist with an emphasis on Archaeobotany and is currently a post-doctoral research fellow of DEMODRIVERS at the ICTA-UAB. He has ample experience with microbotanical remains from the Amazon, primarily focusing on phytolith analysis of shell mounds and Loma sites from the Bolivian Llano de Mojos region.
Giovanni Manzella
Giovanni is an environmental archaeologist with a focus on stable isotope analysis for paleoecological and paleoenvironmental reconstructions. His research has mainly focused on the study of climate, environmental dynamics and human adaptations over time. His PhD within the DEMODRIVERS project focuses on the high-resolution paleo-precipitation records from the Bolivian Amazon by analyzing the hydrogen and carbon isotope composition of plant waxes extracted from archaeological sites.
Andrés Mejía
Andrés Mejía is originally from Mexico City and he received his degree in Physics and Anthropology by Dartmouth College, his Master’s Degree and PhD by the Pennsylvania State University. He arrives at DEMODRIVERS after two years as a Postdoc in the Embodied Cognitive Science Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan. He has over a decade of experience in archaeology, leading the project “The Palaeohydrology of the Valley of Teotihuacan” in the Mexican Altiplano and collaborating in other projects in the May Area and the south of Central America. Andrés specialises both in developing and applying new quantitative and qualitative methods to study the coexistence of living beings and their natural environments and cultural-humanistic approaches to contextualize the issues. Within DEMODRIVERS, Andrés generates demographic models off the radiocarbon determinations and also builds the AI for classifying phytoliths.
Daniela Piraquive-Bermudez
Daniela is a Colombian palaeoecologist whose interests focus on understanding and quantifying the impact of climate and land use on past, present, and future biodiversity in the tropics and subtropics of South America. To achieve this, she uses fossil pollen, non-pollen palynomorphs (NPPs), charcoal, and biomarkers. As part of the DEMODRIVERS project, Daniela will work as a Postdoctoral Researcher, focusing on the palaeoecological history of the Llanos de Moxos in the Bolivian Amazon by studying a 5.5 m lake core with a basal age of 16k cal BP.
Adrián Rivas
Adrian Rivas is a first year clinical and biomedical laboratory student and is an intern at DEMODRIVERS, where he assists in the laboratory with tasks such as cleaning samples or extracting phytoliths.
Julián Puig Guevara
Julián Puig Guevara is a 4th year archaeology student at UAB and is an intern at the DEMODRIVERS project. His main interests are Theoretical approaches to Prehistoric Archaeology and the Archaeology of Ancient Migrations. He assists the team with diffusion of through media and the webpage.
Project Partners
