Professor Keith Dobney (University of Aberdeen Archaeology Department) has recently begun an invited two-month Visiting Professorship appointment at the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris (Departement Ecologie et Gestion de la Biodiversite)
Sponsored by the LABeX initiative (BCDiv - Diversités naturelles et culturelles - origines, évolution, interactions, devenir), Professor Dobney will spend two months as a guest of Professor Jean-Denis Vigne, Directeur of the CNRS funded UMR 7209 Laboratory - Archéozoologie, Archéobotanique Sociétés, Pratiques et Environnement. He will deliver a series of lectures and seminars to staff and students at the museum, and will collaborate with French colleagues on a series of publications and funding applications.
This prestigious invitation serves to further strengthen links between the Bioarchaeology groups at both institutions, formalising and consolidating long-standing research links between them. Aberdeen Archaeology Department has several PhD students (Mr Ardern-Hulme Beaman and Ms Julie Daujat) and a NERC-funded PDRA (Dr Allowen Evin) working in the Paris Laboratory and co-supervised by French colleagues there. In addition, one of our Aberdeen Archaeology lecturers (Dr Thomas Cucchi) also holds a CNRS funded Junior Research position in Professor Vigne’s group.
Professors Dobney and Vigne are also co-directors of several international Bioarchaeology networks - a joint funded CNRS Projet de Groupement De Recherche Européen (GDRE) initiative exploring the Interactions between Holocene Human Societies and their Environments (BIOARCH); and a Co-Reach funded project to set up a joint European-Chinese Bioarchaeology Collaboration between labs in Aberdeen, Paris, Leipzig and Beijing (EUCH-BIOARCH).