Mareike Stahlschmidt

© Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

Mareike Stahlschmidt is an internationally renowned geoarchaeologists focussed on site formation and the sedimentary archaeological record. Using a microncontextual toolkit she studies what the sediments at archaeological sites can tell us about the people who lived there in the past. In her recent ERC-StG project MicroStratDNA (“Reconstructing Paleolithic Population Dynamics Using Microstratified Paleogenomics”), she is combining the fields of geoarchaeology and archaeogenetics to investigate environmental DNA preserved in archaeological sediments and speleothems. She and her group aim to reconstruct the formation history of this particular paleogenetic archive, to investigate the ideal preservation contexts for this type of ancient DNA and to extract genomic time series from archaeological sediments and speleothems.