This month, we welcomed 2 new postdoctoral researchers, Drs. Laura Strolin and Faidon Moudopoulos, and we celebrate that Dr. Arnau Garcia-Molsosa started his Ramón y Cajal fellowship with GIAP, after finishing his Beatriu de Pinós-Marie Curie cofund project (also in GIAP, from 2020-2022).
Dr. Arnau Garcia-Molsosa
Dr. Garcia completed his PhD on the Archaeology of Mountain Cultural Landscapes from the University Rovira i Virgili (URV) in 2013. He has held postdoctoral positions at the State University of New York at Buffalo (US), the Universitat de les Illes Balears (Balearic Islands) and the McDonald Institute for Archaeological research at the University of Cambridge (UK). He is currently employed at ICAC as a Ramón y Cajal researcher, since January 2023.
His research focuses on the study of present landscapes as the result of long-term human-environment interactions and, consequently, part of our cultural heritage. As a landscape archaeologist, he works with archaeological, historical and geospatial data in the context of multidisciplinary studies directed to understand how human societies have inhabited and conceptualised their environment through time.
Dr. Faidon Moudopoulos-Athanasiou
Dr. Faidon Moudopoulos-Athanasiou joined the Landscape Archaeology Research Group of ICAC in January 2023, as a Juan de la Cierva postdoctoral fellow.
He was born in Athens in 1991. He obtained his BA in History and Archaeology from the University of Crete (Rethymno, 2013) and subsequently completed two MAs, one in Aegean Archaeology (University of Sheffield, 2014) and another Heritage Management (University of Kent & AUEB, 2016). In 2021, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Sheffield (dept. of Archaeology). His research focused on the early modern (Ottoman) Zagori, NW Greece, which is also his place of origin. The methodology of his doctoral research combined landscape archaeology (extensive reconnaissance) with archival sources from local (Greek) and imperial (Ottoman) archives, ethnography and ethnoarchaeology.
During the course of his studies, he has received many scholarships and awards. As an undergraduate student he was sponsored by IKY (Greek State Scholarships, 2010-2011) and as an MA student his research was funded by the Piraeus Bank Cultural Foundation (2015-2016). His doctoral research was funded by the White Rose College of the Arts and Humanities (WRoCAH – AHRC) and the A.G. Leventis Foundation.
His research interests include landscape (esp. mountainous) archaeology, post-medieval (Ottoman) archaeology, archaeological theory, the history of archaeology and cultural landscapes. He has worked closely with regional stakeholders in Zagori while public outreach and community engagement are at the core of his practice.
Dr. Laura Strolin
Born in Geneva, after growing up in Naples (Italy), Dr. Laura Strolin studied classical archeology at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Bologna. She continued her education with doctoral studies at the University of Geneva in order to explore the phenomenon of reuse in the context of the transformation of ancient cities by the contribution of Christianity during Late Antiquity in North Africa (2020). At the same time, she devoted herself to archaeozoological studies at Leicester (2009), Bologna (2011) and Geneva (2014-2015), developing research in the Near East, where she studied faunal remains from archaeological sites dating from the Neolithic to the Iron Age (2012-2022), focusing on the first evidence of herding and the role of animals in rituals. During her post-doc (2021-2022) she studied animal mobility along the Incense Route.
With her Juan de la Cierva project, entitled “Off the beaten track: the diffusion of Imperial economic influence to inland regions in Antiquity”, she will investigate the movement of livestock from the coast inland along the Roman Empire, focusing on three main geographic areas: Llevant, Sicily and Catalonia. She will use an archaeozoological approach, applying Geometric Morphometric Methods in order to detect breed variations, which are the most concrete indication for trafficking of animals. She will perform her research at the ICAC under the supervision of Dr Lídia Colominas.
