Twice per year, ASPR faculty gather near Harvard University campus to share stories and connect. The 2025 Fall gathering saw us at the Smoke Shop BBQ in Harvard Square, where each of our four Junior Fellows gave a roughly five minute long talk about their recent research.
Kayla Worthey, a second-year fellow, discussed her research on paleoclimate in the North African stone age, and how shifting climate in the Sahara Desert affected mobility and connection for stone age populations.
Pablo Gutiérrez de León just joined the ASPR this fall, and his talk reviewed some of the projects he has been working on since then. His main research topic concerns nomadic pastoralism in the Horn of Africa, with a focus on locating funerary structures through remote sensing and field surveys combined with occasional excavations. Once located, Pablo uses GIS analysis to look for distribution patters and proximity to resources in order to understand territoriality and movement. In his flash talk, he also shared a few “side quests” that he has embarked on since joining ASPR!
Margot Louail is in her second year with us, and her research focuses on the past ecologies of African suids and primates in the Pliocene and Pleistocene to explore the role of seasonality and feeding habits on their evolution. Her research mostly involves dental wear analysis and stable isotopes, and she is also developing tools to better interpret isotopic variations in diet and to investigate how suids and hominins responded to environmental dynamics in the Turkana Depression.
Jingbo Li began her time with us this fall, and she discussed foodways and the development of complex societies in Neolithic and Bronze Age China, with a particular focus on how diet, alcohol production, and ritual practices shaped political authority and cultural identity. Her work combines experimental archaeology with cutting-edge scientific methods such as GC/MS, HPLC, and AI-based starch identification models, advancing new approaches for residue studies. Beyond her dissertation, Li is pursuing projects on the cultural and technological history of beer brewing in China, from the Neolithic to the Imperial period, and she is expanding her research to explore dairy production and fermented foods using biomolecular techniques, including ZooMS and ancient DNA.