Landscapes
How do landscapes become inhabited systems?
Reconstructing channels, wetlands, land cover, agriculture and settlement as coupled spatial histories rather than environmental backdrops.
Palaeoecology · Geoarchaeology · Resilience
People, Landscapes & Change
Exploring the past, reflecting on the present, simulating the future. I study how societies and landscapes shape one another across long timescales—from Nile Delta wetlands and ancient waterways to agropastoral landscapes in western Norway.
Nile Deltawetlands · waterways · agriculture
Western Norwayland cover · disturbance · resilience
Multi-proxypollen · sediments · archaeology · geochemistry
Deep time → presentchronology · rates · thresholds · legacies
Research questions
My work is organized around a simple problem: how can fragmentary environmental and archaeological archives be made to say something defensible about changing relationships between people, water, vegetation, institutions and landscape?
Change
When does gradual pressure become reorganization?
Using chronology-aware rates, breakpoints, early-warning indicators and multi-proxy trajectories to distinguish trend, threshold and archive artefact.
Resilience
Why do places respond differently?
Comparing connectivity, functional diversity, resource flexibility and landscape inheritance to explain asynchronous socio-ecological trajectories.
Current research
Four linked programmes connect deep-time environmental reconstruction with questions of adaptation, agricultural dependence, state formation and contemporary ecological change.
Egypt · Coastal lakes
Environmental change in Nile Delta coastal lakes
Recovering MEDIBA and later lake archives to test recent ecological change in Manzala, Burullus and Mariut.
Enter the research atlas →Egypt · Ancient state
Nile Delta socio-ecological resilience
Multi-site analysis of environmental, archaeological and human-impact records to test asynchronous transitions and uneven propagation of change.
Project overview →Egypt · Early farming
From crop presence to agricultural dependence
Multi-proxy reassessment of early Delta economies, separating the appearance of domesticates from increasing dependence on cultivation.
Project overview →Norway · Holocene
From marine-oriented disturbance to agropastoral landscapes
REVEALS-based land-cover reconstruction and long-term analysis of landscape transformation along the western Norwegian coast.
Project overview →Selected work
Research combines palaeoecological archives, archaeology, sedimentology, GIS and quantitative time-series analysis.
Nile waterscapes facilitated the construction of the Giza pyramids during the 3rd millennium BCEPNAS · 2022
Feeding the pyramid builders: Early agriculture at Giza in EgyptQuaternary Science Reviews · 2023
Socio-ecological resilience propagated unevenly through Ancient Egypt state in the Nile DeltaCommunications Earth & Environment · in review
Not by Bread Alone: Contrasting Nile Delta trajectories to Agriculture at the dawn of ancient EgyptQuaternary Science Reviews · in press