Senior Research Assistant/Research Fellow

University of Southampton - Palaeoenvironmental Laboratory

Full Time Fixed Term For 3 Years

Celtic Connections and Crannogs: A new Study of Lake Settlements Across the Irish Sea is a new AHRC funded research project led by Professor Tony Brown (PI) and Dr Peter Langdon (Southampton), with other collaborators from Newcastle, Plymouth and Queen’s (Belfast) Universities.

You will work as part of a multi-institutional team under the direction of Professor Tony Brown and Dr Peter Langdon. Your primary role will be to undertake detailed fieldwork and lake sediment recovery on a number of Crannog sites from across the Irish sea, mainly between SE Scotland and NE Ireland. In addition, there is much archaeological and palaeoenvironmental data and background literature on these sites which will need to be collated. You will undertake palaeoecological analyses on the lake sediments, which may/could include pollen, diatoms, chironomids and/or coleopteran analyses (some proxies will be done by another researcher). Your other main role will be to undertake the basic sedimentological (LOI, TOC/TN) and geochemical (Itrax XRF) analyses on the sediments, plus prepare ancient DNA samples for processing in Grenoble.

You will liaise with the other postdocs and co-investigators working on other proxies (Plymouth) and biomarkers (Newcastle), and the aDNA lab in Grenoble. You will also analyse the data collected, contribute to project meetings, attend conferences and be encouraged to produce publications.

You will have a PhD in Palaeoecology or a related aspect of Physical Geography/Earth Sciences/Environmental Science/Archaeology, knowledge of palaeolimnology, and a keen interest in archaeology and/or aDNA.  You will have a willingness to develop skills in the area of aDNA and the ability to work both independently and effectively in a team. A good ability with multivariate statistics, together with experience of working in R would be advantageous.

This position is tenable from 1 April 2015 or as soon as possible thereafter.