Curriculum

I am an evolutionary archaeologist, and my background formation includes Palaeolithic Archaeology, Paleoanthropology, and Cultural Anthropology.

I am particularly interested in exploring the relationships between biological and cultural evolution.

I graduated at Sapienza University in 2002 with Amilcare Bietti, who was my mentor and thought me the most useful things I still know, first of all what it means to be a scientist. MY BA thesis was about spatial analyses of a Late Neanderthal site, Grotta Breuil, located in the Mount Circeo, 100 km south of Rome, and well known for the so-called "Pontinian" lithic industry.

After the BA, I moved to IPGQ in Bordeaux for a Master in Archaeology and Palaeoanthropology, where I graduated with a mémoire about anvil percussion, particularly focused on the chaînes opératoires of the "Pontinian", with an experimental approach. This thesis resulted in several papers and conference presentations, and still I have a passion for the anvil percussive technology!

I started then a European PhD, codirected in Rome and Bordeaux: the subject was the Mousterian of the Salento, a peninsula in South-eastern Italy where I wanted to test if the Neanderthals used non-local raw material. At that time, it was largely believed that Neanderthals territories were relatively small and their lithic provisioning local. Actually, in the Salento, raw materials seem to come from farther territories and this leads to a peculiar use of the available materials.

Once finished my PHD I worked for one year exclusively on contract archaeology, ad I was doing part-time since my graduation, and that experience has been very formative for me about how to handle excavation in harder contexts, and faster!

One year later, in 2009, I started a Marie Curie Individual Fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. Contextually, I become a mum and I got divorced: it has been quite the adventure! I stayed at the MPI until 2013, and the adventure was also to see the Middle Palaeolithic (my lifelong passion) from an African point of view: I was in fact studying the Aterian.

Studying the Aterian thought a lot about the behavioural differences between Neanderthal and Homo sapiens, and in general about the large variability in the MP. It arised for me the interest towards the MSA sensu latu, and I started then to participate to project in Ethiopia first (joining the Melka Kunture team), and then in Kenya.

With a lot of excitement, in 2013-2015 i joined the In-Africa Project and in 2014 I moved as post doctoral fellow in Cambridge, at the LCHES, under the supervision of Marta Mirazon Lahr. In that frame, I started fieldwork in West - Turkana, and studied MSA lithics from over there. And I learned a lot! To work with Marta Lahr and Robert Foley, among the archeologist I admire the most, was to me a milestone.

Finally, by the end of 2015 I started as PI the (H)ORIGIN project and moved to Rome, where I have been Montalcini fellow for three years, and then Associate Professor since 2019.

I am still working on MSA and more in general on Middle Palaeolithic; I like to study hunter gatherers societies. I am interested in cognitive abilities of Neanderthals and Early Homo sapiens; I am interested to test if we can isolate structured populations through lithic technology; to understand the cognitive abilities connected with the percussive technology. I would like to test models about human evolution in the last 300000 years, and to better understand the relationship between different species and their tool use.