The Department of Archaeological Sciences, Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University, is looking for a PhD candidate to perform research on the visibility of sessile foods (plants, honey) and food processing techniques (fermentation, cooking) in dental calculus. The project is part of the NWO-VICI awarded to Prof. dr. A.G. Henry, titled: “Hominin FoodWays: Changing diet and food processing across climate frontiers,” which explores the drivers behind the first hominin migration out of Africa. Homo erectus was the first of our ancestors to leave a narrow range of African habitats and expand into Eurasia, but the behavioural changes that allowed this migration remain debated. This project uses an interdisciplinary combination of new and established methods to understand how changes in diet and food processing contributed to this species’ expansion into new regions. What you will do: Collaborate with project partners to design and implement experiments in which food residues are embedded in lab-grown dental calculus, in order to assess how visible these may be in the archaeological record; Assist in the interpretation of mass spectrometry, protein and DNA data provided project partners.
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