This September Dr. Matteo Bormetti has joined the archaeozoology team at GIAP-ICAC embarking on a new Juan de la Cierva project titled “Mapping Responses to Roman Imperialism in Animal Husbandry”.
Matteo will be working under the supervision of Dr Lídia Colominas and Dr Arnau Garcia to investigate the adaptive strategies employed by culturally and ecologically diverse regions of the empire in response to Roman imposition, through the collection of published zooarchaeological data in a GIS-based database, spatial and network analysis, and the interpretation of data through a framework informed by social theory.
Dr Matteo Bormetti completed his PhD on animal husbandry and socioeconomic change in the British Later Iron Age at the University of Sheffield in 2023. Since then, he has been teaching zooarchaeology at the University of Milan, where he is also part of PrEcLab (Laboratorio di Preistoria, Protostoria ed Ecologia Preistorica), has held a postdoctoral position at the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, and currently serves as Assistant Editor for the ICAZ Newsletter. He has led faunal research on the Meninx Archaeological Project in Tunisia and the Monte Zara excavation in Sardinia, alongside further field collaborations in Oman and Greece.
As an archaeologist specialised in human-animal relationships, his research includes animal husbandry systems, urban provisioning, ancient beekeeping, and the exploitation of cetaceans and molluscs, with a focus on the social implications of animal economies spanning Britain and the Mediterranean from later prehistory through the historical period.
