Dr. Cheryl Makarewicz
Laboratory Director
2010 - current | c.makarewicz@ufg.uni-kiel.de
Dr. Cheryl Makarewicz is Professor of Zooarchaeology and Stable Isotope Biogeochemistry at Kiel University. Cheryl's inspiration comes from her extensive research and travels throughout the Near East and Inner Asia where she has carried out archaeological fieldwork, led biomolecular proof-of-concept research, and worked closely with contemporary pastoralists. Extensive ethno-archaeological research in Mongolia and Jordan engages nomadic herders documenting the diverse ways in which they manage their livestock, process meat and dairy for daily meals, and move across the landscape throughout the year. As part of this, Cheryl draws out how these pastoralist behaviors are expressed in the faunal and biomolecular records - rich and durable archives that store information on the dietary intake and mobility of both humans and animals.
Cheryl directs ASIL and oversees all research, operations, and visioning. Her research and management attract and facilitate international researchers to lead in stable isotope research.
Dr. Christine Winter-Schuh
Lab Manager
2014 - current | c.winter-schuh@ufg.uni-kiel.de
Dr. Christine Winter-Schuh is a post-doctoral researcher investigating pastoralist mobility across the Eurasian steppe through strontium and oxygen isotope analyses of human dental remains. Tine received her MA in Anthropology and Pre- and Protohistory from the University of Mainz and completed her PhD in Natural Sciences from the University of Kiel (2014). Her dissertation focused on the use of strontium, carbon, and oxygen isotopes to investigate mobility during the Early Middle Ages in the Upper Rhine Valley. As a postdoc at the Leibniz Laboratory for Radiometric Dating, she gained hands-on experience with different isotope ratio mass spectrometers and their peripherals. Since 2015, Tine has worked as a research scientist at the Institute of Pre- and Protohistoric Archaeology at Kiel University, where she has been involved in teaching and in diverse isotope projects in regions from Europe to East Asia.
Tine manages ASIL and is responsible for the operation and maintenance of analytical instruments and equipment, the overall organisation of the lab, and the supervision of PhD students and postdocs in the lab work. She is also involved in improving routine protocols and establishing new methods for stable isotope research.
Lea Kohlhage
Research Assistant
2023 - current | lea.kohlhage@ufg.uni-kiel.de
Lea conducts research focusing on zooarchaeology and the reconstruction of past human-animal relationships, including stable isotope ecology. She studied Pre- and Protohistoric Archaeology and Anthropology of the Americas at the Universities of Bonn (BA) and Kiel (MA) and has worked on archaeological and zooarchaeological projects in Germany, Italy, Mongolia, Svalbard, and Jordan. Her long-term participation in the excavations of the German Archaeological Institute at Karabalgasun (Mongolia) inspired her MA thesis "Provisioning the capital of a nomadic steppe empire: Animal exploitation at the Uyghur capital Karabalgasun (745-840 CE)".
Lea is a research assistant at ASIL and is involved in sample preparation, workflow organization, supervision of student researchers and assistants, and data management.
Current Postdoctoral Researchers
Dr. Paul Duffy
Dr. Duffy investigates the emergence of community hierarchy and combines computational archaeology, landscape analysis, and funerary studies to understand variation in the middle-range societies in prehistoric Europe. He currently studies the impact of Bronze Age plough agriculture on the development of complex societies using stable isotope data from plant and animal remains. Along with his colleagues in the Körös Consortium, Dr. Duffy also co-direct an excavation project at the Bronze Age tell-cluster of Békés-Várdomb, and a conservation project at the Neolithic and Bronze Age tell site of Vésztő-Mágor in Hungary.
Dr. Linda Amos
Dr. Amos began her academic career at the University of Bergen in Norway studying the concept of 'modern human behaviour' in early anatomically modern humans in sub-Saharan Africa and Eurasian Neanderthals. She then continued to study Neanderthal behaviour during a PhD at Liverpool John Moores University in the UK, pivoting into the study of bird remains as proxies of human subsistence, culture, and ecology. In her doctoral thesis, Dr. Linda Amos applied taxonomic and taphonomic analysis to bird bones from five Neanderthal sites across Eurasia. She continued this work in a two-year postdoctoral project at the University of Haifa in Israel to conduct ornitho-archaeological analyses of material from sites at Mount Carmel. Today, Dr. Amos has expanded her scope even further to include interactions between birds and other Middle Palaeolithic human populations, as well as slightly more recent Upper Palaeolithic, Epipalaeolithic and Neolithic populations. Given the choice, Dr. Amos is still a Neanderthal at heart.
ResearchGate profile | @PaleoBIRDProject | @ArchaeoAmos
Dr. Ma'ayan Lev
At ASIL, Dr. Lev investigates the relationship between environmental dynamics, resource intensification and the rise of agriculture through analyses of herpetofaunal remains and isotopic analyses of leaf wax n-alkanes recovered from Natufian and Pre-Pottery Neolithic sites located in the Southern Levant.
Dr. Michaela Ecker
Dr. Ecker's research interest is the influence of long-term climatic and environmental changes on human cultural evolution with a geographical focus on Europe, Southwestern Asia and Southern Africa. Her interdisciplinary approach includes carbonate and biomarker stable isotope techniques to reconstruct past environments. Dr. Ecker is currently an Emmy Noether Research Group Leader, conducting fieldwork in the southern Kalahari.
Kgalagadi Human Origins project | Kiel University profile
Dr. Laura Strolin
At ASIL, Dr. Laura Strolin applies an integrated approach of zooarchaeology and stable isotope analysis to faunal remains from Neolithic archaeological sites in North-West Arabia, in order to investigate the spread of pastoralism in the area and the role of animals in rituals. Dr. Strolin studied classical archaeology at the University of Bologna and at the University of Geneva, with a PhD investigating the phenomenon of reuse in Late Antiquity. In parallel, she engaged in zooarchaeological studies at the University of Leicester, at the University of Bologna and at the Museum of Natural History of Geneva. She developed zooarchaeological research in the Arabian Peninsula, studying faunal assemblages from archaeological sites dating from the Neolithic to Islamic times.
Dr. Thomas Larsen
Dr. Larsen's research focuses on the impact of environmental changes and human exploitation on food webs and ecosystem functioning through stable isotope techniques and biomolecular methods. He pioneered the development of stable isotope fingerprinting of amino acids, an innovative method for tracing the biosynthetic origins of essential amino acids that have provided unprecedented insights into both ancient and modern resource use. Using isoscapes and probability models, Dr. Larsen currently investigates how human manipulation of horse movement influenced equine domestication processes and explores the role of Near Eastern ruminant livestock in early horse husbandry.
PhD Candidates
Fiona Walker-Friedrichs, MSc
07/2022 - 12/2025
Fiona is a PhD candidate at the Excellence Cluster of ROOTS. She holds a BA in Archaeology with a minor in Biology from Kiel University and a MA in Bioarchaeology from Durham University. Her PhD research focuses on understanding agricultural knowledge in Bronze Age Denmark through weed ecology and stable isotope analysis ( δ13C / δ15N ). She is also interested in exploring carbon and nitrogen stable isotope analysis in lesser-studied species like Camelina sativa.
Karolina Varkuleviciute, MSc
04/2021 - 07/2025
Karolina Varkuleviciute is a PhD candidate at the Cluster of Excellence ROOTS at Kiel University. Her research focuses on method development and improvement for stable isotope analysis. She is also interested in studying animal pastoralist practices, human dietary choices, and their connections to social, political, and economic factors in past societies - especially investigating enamel diagenetic alteration ( δ13C / δ18O ) and pastoralist dietary intake ( δ13C / δ15N ).
Nathaniel James, MA
01/2023 - 12/2027
Nathaniel James is a PhD Candidate at the University of California San Diego who has conducted fieldwork across China, Thailand, Belize, and the North American Southwest and Pacific Northwest. His family's history of farming, and their ultimate failure to maintain that livelihood led to his ongoing research focus: the multitude of ways in which agricultural labor was organized by both individual households and larger polities, and the broader interactions between early states, agricultural land use, and inequality. His current work is with the Indica Project, exploring through the carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis of modern experimental and archaeological grains the cultivation practices ancient farmers used to domesticate Oryza sativa indica in North India.
Henriette Brandt, MA
08/2022 - 12/2025
Henriette focuses on the linear pottery culture (LBK) settlement of Vráble, Slovakia. There, she studies human remains to uncover biosocial aspects of individual lives, such as dietary habits and social structures, through isotopic analysis. Additionally, Henriette compares dietary patterns with burial practices, incorporating variables like age, sex, and pathologies to interpret the social dynamics and trans-local connections within LBK communities. Altogether, her work aims to provide insights into the complexity of these Neolithic societies which has been under-examined in previous studies.
Tuvshinjargal Tumurbaatar, MA
Guest Researchers
Dr. Stefanie Eisenmann
Lecturer from Freie Universität Berlin
Dr. Kelly Reed
Lecturer from Oxford Brookes University
Hannah Farrell
MA Candidate from University of Haifa | Elephant dental remains at Gesher Benot Ya'qov: A case for seasonality in the middle Pleistocene Levantine Corridor out of Africa
Dr. Sergio Jiminez
Postdoctoral Researcher from University of Barcelona | Mesowear data collection on Pre-Pottery Neolithic fauna
Dr. Harel Shochat
Postdoctoral Researcher from University of Haifa | LBA ivories, organic δ18O, δD, δ13C, and δ15N
Former Postdoctoral Researchers
Dr. Angela Trentacoste
Current Senior Fellow at the British School in Rome
Dr. Pascal Flohr
Current Digital Scholarship Librarian, Leiden University
Prof. Max Price
Current Professor of Zooarchaeology at Durham University
Prof. Leland Rogers
Current Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington
Dr. Iain Kendall
Current Technical Specialist, University of Bristol
Dr. Karren Palmer
Current Regulatory Compliance Administrator, University of Manchester
Dr. Taylor Hermes
Prof. Alicia Ventresca-Miller
Current Assistant Professor Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan
Prof. Minghao Lin
Current Assistant Professor Zhiyuan College
Dr. Christine Winter-Schuh
Current ASIL Laboratory Manager, University of Kiel
Dr. Isabella von Holstein
Current Research Community Manager, Department of Computing, Imperial College London
Prof. Paula Doumani Dupuy
Current Associate Professor, Nazarbayev University
Prof. Kate Grillo
Current Associate Professor, University of Florida
Dr. Austin 'Chad' Hill
Current Researcher at the University of Pennsylvania
Former PhD Candidates
Dr. Natalia Eguez
Current Tenure-Track Ramon y Cajal Fellow at the Spanish National Research Council
Dr. Christine Winter-Schuh
Current ASIL Laboratory Manager
Dr. Taylor Hermes
Sarah Pleuger
Student Assistants
Alexander Gorelik
10/2024 - current
Johannes Rüttermann
05/2024 - current | isotope variation experiment, FTIR, modern plant treatment
Victoria Boensch
09/2023 - current | documentation, collagen extraction, microbalance, incremental drilling
Eileen Pohl
10/2023 - current | documentation, collagen extraction, microbalance, enamel pretreatment
Hanna Gressmann
11/2023 - current | enamel pretreatment, modern plant identification
Lily Kazanoff
10/2024 - current | website development
Sophia Politt
01/2024 - 12/2024 | ASIL Technical Assistant
Elena Diehl
07/2023 - 03/2024 | documentation, microbalance, plant Sr preparation, Picarro
Amelie Schmücker
10/2022 - 03/2024 | documentation, collagen extraction, microbalance, modern plant identification and Sr preparation, Picarro
Christian Himpich
12/2023 - 08/2024 | documentation, collagen extraction, microbalance
Lasse Lübker
08/2023 - 10/2023 | modern plant identification and Sr preparation, enamel pretreatment
Carl Meeker
02/2023 - 04/2023 | modern plant Sr preparation
Henrike Franske
09/2022 - 02/2023 | Picarro, microbalance
Anna-Marie Brendel
04/2024 - 07/2024 | enamel pretreatment
Julia Scharl
collagen extraction
Muskan Shahid
collagen extraction, microbalance
Hanna Ruckert
collagen extraction, microbalance
Elena Ludwig
collagen extraction, microbalance