Anthrotopography Laboratory

KUKA robot performing a scraping task.
(Credit: Fabio Bergamin, ETH-Zürich)

Contact Information

Director: Dr. Radu Iovita

Email: iovita@nyu.edu

Phone: 212-992-7475

Research

Let him lose himself in wonders as amazing in their littleness as the others in their vastness.– Blaise Pascal, Pensées, Man’s Disproportion (1670, trans. T.S. Eliot, 2003 edition)

The Anthrotopography Laboratory takes advantage of a common methodology (surface analysis) to link two strands of research into the material traces of human action at two fundamentally different scale: the microscopic and the landscape scale.  We focus on two main questions:

  1.  How did ancient landscapes and their associated environments influence past human migrations; and
  2. How did prehistoric people employ simple technologies to adapt to the diverse environments they encountered?

Currently, landscape-scale project focus on using remote sensing and other geoarchaeological methods to predict and discover new sites and ultimately understand the role of Central Asian mountain foothills in connecting various parts of Asia during the Stone Age (see PALAEOSILKROAD and Maibulak Projects).  At the microscopic scale, we are interested in characterizing use-traces through controlled experiment and using them to reconstruct the evolution of hominin gesture and motor control (see RoboCut Project).

Equipment and Resources

The Anthrotopography lab is in its early stages of development and many new and exciting tools are being added as they are needed in research projects.

  • reflected light microscopes
  • transmitted light microscopes
  • metrology software
  • use-wear experiment cast collection

Research Projects

  

Excavations at Maibulak
(Credit: Radu Iovita)

Lab Members

Sara Borsodi joined the lab as a Ph.D. student in Fall 2023. Her previous education is from the University of Michigan with a B.A. in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies. Sara has many research interests including; experimental archaeology, stone tools, fieldwork, use-wear analysis, paleo landscapes and migrations, ancient fire usage, and computer applications. She has previous experience with experimental archaeology and use-wear analysis of percussive tools.
 
Felix Devis Kisena joined the lab as a Ph.D. student in Fall 2023. He is an archaeologist with a BA in Archaeology from the University of Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania, and MA through the Erasmus Mundus International Master in Quaternary and Prehistory with a specialization in Prehistoric archaeology. Felix’s academic interests lie in the Early Stone Age archaeology of Eastern Africa, especially in the Acheulean period in the northern highlands of Tanzania. He anticipates incorporating landscape inferences, experimental archaeology, and use-wear analysis to determine artifact utility and environmental site formation processes.
 

Dr. Jing Zhang joined the lab in June 2023 as an NSF-funded postdoc (Understanding and classifying lithic use wear: a systematic study using controlled tribological experiments and computer vision). She received her B.E. and M.S. degrees in Surveying and Mapping Engineering in 2017 and 2019, and her Ph.D. in Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing from Wuhan University in June 2023. Her research interest lies in 3D computer vision and the application of artificial intelligence in archaeology. Currently, she is working on 3D reconstruction, understanding and classification on lithic use wear.

 

Lab Alumni