Bosch, Marjolein

I study past human-animal interactions and how people adapted to changes in their environment. With this research, funded by an ERC-Starting Grant, provides a deep-time perspective of human resilience to climate change. Everyday Palaeolithic life – just like ours today – was composed of a range of different activities – domestic chores (e.g., site investment, cooking), social networking, and travelling to forage for daily needs both perishable (e.g., plant foods, hunting animals and water) and mineral (e.g., raw materials to make stone tools). Climate change forces shifts the habitats people lived in, such as animal availability on the landscape, vegetation cover etc. I explore how these changes influenced people’s lives during the last ice-age when climate change and extreme seasonal shifts made environmental conditions highly unpredictable, similar to what we are experiencing today.

• Pleistocene Zooarchaeology
• Past adaptation to climate change
• Hominin-environment interactions
• Subsistence behaviour & diet
• Taphonomy and site formation processes
• Archaeometry: Stable isotope analysis, micro-CT and sedimentary biomarkers
• Organic technology
• Personal adornment and socially mediated behaviour

• 2002 Propedeuse (first degree) in Archaeology, Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University, Netherlands
• 2009 Doctorandus (Drs.: equivalent to a Master’s degree) in Archaeology, Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University, Netherlands
• 2009–2015 PhD candidate, Department of Human Evolution, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany
• 2013 Zooarchaeological expert: analysis of the ivory and bone industry at Grub-Kranawetberg, Austria. Department of Prehistory, Natural History Museum, Vienna
• 2015–2018 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
• 2018 PhD, Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University, Netherlands, and Department of Human Evolution, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany
• 2019–2021 Research Associate & Visiting Lecturer, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
• 2021–2022 Part-time Postdoctoral Researcher, Zooarchaeological Expert in the ‘Prehistoric Identities’ research group, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austrian Archaeological Institute
• 2021 – present Research Associate, Turkana Basin Institute Ltd, Turkana, Kenya, and Turkana Basin Institute, Stony Brook University, NY
• 2022 – present Research Associate, Natural History Museum Vienna, Department of Prehistory
• 2022 – present Research Associate, Austrian Archaeological Institute – Prehistory, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria
• 2022–2024 Postdoctoral Researcher with ‘Seal of Excellence’, Austrian Archaeological Institute – Prehistory, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria
• 2025 Postdoctoral researcher, Vienna Institute for Archaeological Science, University of Vienna
• since March 2026 Tenure track professorship in Palaeolithic Archaeozoology at the University of Vienna