Lisa-Marie Shillito | |
Nationality: | English |
Citizenship: | United Kingdom |
Occupation: | Senior Lecturer, Director of Laboratory |
Website: | https://castlesandcoprolites.blogspot.com/ |
Education: | PhD Chemistry and Archaeology, University of Reading, 2008 |
Thesis Title: | Investigating traces of activities, diet and seasonality in middens at Neolithic catalhoyuk : An integration of microstratigraphic, phytolith and chemical analyses |
Thesis Url: | https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.529968 |
Thesis Year: | 2008 |
Doctoral Advisor: | Matthew Almond and Wendy Matthews |
Discipline: | Archaeology |
Sub Discipline: | Archaeological Science, Geoarchaeology, Landscape Archaeology |
Workplaces: | Newcastle University, School of History, Classics and Archaeology |
Lisa-Marie Shillito is a British archaeologist and senior lecturer in landscape archaeology as well as director of the Wolfson Archaeology Laboratory and Earthslides at Newcastle University.[1] Her practical work focuses on using soil micromorphology, phytolith analysis and geochemistry in order to understand human behaviour and landscape change. Her work includes the Neolithic settlements of Çatalhöyük in Turkey[2] and Ness of Brodgar[3] and Durrington Walls[4] in Britain, but also Crusader castles and medieval settlements in Poland and the Baltic and in the Near East.
Additionally, she is editor of The Archaeological Journal,[5] assistant-editor of the journal Landscape Research,[6] member of AHRC Peer Review College[7] and member of the UKRI Future Leadership Fellows PRC.[8]
Shillito started her education in archaeology at the University of Oxford, where she earned a BA (Hons) in geography. She completed a MSc in geoarchaeology at the University of Reading in 2004. Subsequently, she took on a PhD at the same university dealing with the geoarchaeological analysis of middens from Çatalhöyük in Turkey, which she completed in 2008.[9] [10] Results from this PhD research were published in various papers and a book in 2011. Alongside this PhD project, her job as a Research Assistant working in Geoarchaeology focused in particular on using FT-IR and other methods for studying residues from soil samples for analysis of organic lipids.
Since her PhD, Shillito has worked as a Research Associate in Archaeological Chemistry at the University of York between 2010 and 2012 and again at the University of Reading between 2012 and 2013. In 2013 she became a Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, until 2015. She took up a lecturer position at the University of Newcastle, which allowed her to organise a MSc curriculum in Geoarchaeology and direct the Wolfson Archaeology Laboratory.
Within all these different research positions, she managed to provide an interdisciplinary perspective using micromorphological, geochemical, phytolith and coprolite datasets to archaeological case studies from all across the world.
Since 2018 she is the head of the Earthslides facility:[11] a lab for thin-section preparation and analysis for commercial clients and collaborative academic research into archaeological and geological questions.