Bio

Joyce Ho is a second-year PhD student in the Archaeology program at the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University. Her main research interests lie in the archaeology of technology, the organization and landscape of craft production, the role of birds in ancient societies, critical heritage studies, and museum studies. She is particularly interested in exploring ceramic and metal production in Central Asia and South Caucasus from the Chalcolithic to the Early Iron Age through compositional and spatial analyses. Her current projects involve thin-section petrographic analysis of ceramics from Turkmenistan, and the identification and development of collagen peptide biomarkers for exotic bird species using Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS).

Joyce earned a BSc in Archaeology from University College London, and a MSc in Archaeological Science from the University of Oxford. She then worked as a research assistant at the Hong Kong Metropolitan University on heritage studies. She has excavated in Britain, Israel, Morocco, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan.

Research Interests

• Craft production in the South Caucasus and Central Asia
• Archaeometallurgy
• Ceramic petrography
• Material and spatial analysis
• Zooarchaeology by mass spectrometry (ZooMS)
• Critical heritage studies
• Museum studies