| Umberto Albarella | |
| Nationality: | Italian-British |
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Umberto Albarella is an Italian-British archaeologist, prehistorian, and activist. He is professor of Zooarchaeology at the Department of Archaeology, University of Sheffield. Albarella's previous work has been based in Britain, Italy, Armenia, Greece, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, France, and Portugal.
Albarella graduated from the University of Naples in the 1980s with a degree in Natural Science but became interested in anthropology and archaeology since being undergraduate student in 1982.[1] [2] In 2004, he received a PhD from the University of Durham, with a thesis titled The archaeology of pig domestication and husbandry : approaches and case studies, supervised by Peter Rowley-Conwy.[3]
Between 1993 and 1995 Albarella worked at the London branch of English Heritage. He was then an archaeologist at the University of Birmingham from 1995 to 2000, and the University of Durham from 2000 to 2004. In 2004, Albarella joined the Department of Archaeology as a Research Officer to expand and develop the zooarchaeology lab. On the 15th June 2021, Albarella gave his professorship inaugural lecture at the University of Sheffield.
Albarella has written numerous journal articles, book chapters and edited volumes. Pigs and humans: 10,000 years of interaction, published in 2007, was the first major attempt at synthesising archaeological studies of pigs.[4] The 2011 volume, EthnoZooArchaeology: The Past and Present of Human-Animal Relationships, was described as "important collection of papers for both ethnoarchaeologists and zooarchaeologists".[5] Albarella and colleagues edited the Oxford Handbook of Zooarchaeology, published in 2017 and noted for its international breadth and thematic diversity.[6]
He has supervised numerous PhD students, including Richard Thomas, Angelos Hadjikoumis, Angela Trentacoste, Lizzie Wright. Albarella has served on the editorial boards of the journals Anthropozoologica, Environmental Archaeology and Medieval Archaeology.[7] In 2002, he was elected onto the International Committee of ICAZ, and served as General Secretary of ICAZ from 2006 to 2012.
Albarella is a member of the ICAZ Committee of Honor, recognising individuals who have made a major contribution to archaeozoology. He is noted for his " keen sense of social responsibility" and is "much loved in the global community of zooarchaeologists".