Dr Sadie Watson is leading a four-year UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship looking at maximising public benefit from archaeology carried out on UK infrastructure projects. In this blog series, she keeps us up to date with her progress…
Our little team is growing again! We have now been joined by Dr Kate Faccia, who will be working as a Research Associate over the coming year. Kate will focus on the widespread public consultation we are planning as a central part of our UKRI project, collaborating with the Council for British Archaeology and other groups to establish a more participatory approach to archaeology.
This approach aims to develop a methodology for public participation at the early decision-making and planning stages as this is known to be a positive way to improve community wellbeing and cohesion, taking this participation into account throughout all stages of a project.
Kate has been a MOLA colleague for many years already; working within the London-based field team, she has been an integral part of many projects of all sizes, including the excavation of Roman waterfronts on Sugar Quay, Georgian and Victorian burials at St. James’s Gardens, and the 16th century playhouse at The Stage. Before she came to MOLA, Kate was an academic researcher, with an interest in complex prehistoric groups. Her PhD from the University of Calgary, focused on the osteoarchaeology of northern hunter-gatherer societies, which included excavating and analysing human remains from several sites along the Lake Baikal coast. Kate also completed a post-doctoral position at the University of Cambridge, exploring activity patterns and identity in Baltic Mesolithic foragers, before and after the introduction of pottery.
While in post, Kate will be continuing her research into prehistoric groups, focusing on skeletal remains and burial practices from a Pre-Pottery Neolithic site in Jordan, where she served as the osteoarchaeologist over two field seasons. The site contains some of the earliest examples of permanent architecture, with community members buried in an assortment of ways, within community structures. The community itself represents a group of people who were transitioning from foraging to farming, and it provides the opportunity to study how health, behaviour, social and cultural practices shifted with such seminal changes in landscape use and economy.
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