Durham University

Post-Doc, Archaeology

Marie Curie post-doctoral fellow

Ustinov

Thesis Title: El Poblamiento del Bronce Final y Primer Hierro en el sector meridional de la Submeseta Norte [Later Bronze Age & Early Iron Age settlement in the southern North Meseta]

About

I am a Spanish archaeologist educated in culture historical archaeological practice (BA in History 2001, University of Salamanca), engaged in a doctoral dissertation research within the same institution (PhD viva 2009) which essentially addressed functionalist issues through the study of settlement patterns between Late Bronze Age and Early Ion Age in the Iberian Meseta using GIS.
Concerning my professional career I held several postgraduate research fellowships (2001-2008), worked as technician involved in cultural heritage management tasks with the autonomous administration (2010) and I also worked as archaeologist in the commercial sector (2011).

My personal involvement with the ‘processualist’ research agenda, and my experience recording and managing data in a traditional way let me adopt an increasing awareness of the pitfalls and shortcomings of this mainstream of archaeological thought and practice (somehow manifested throughout my early papers). I'm currently trying to supersede this kind of unsatisfactory and biased accounts. Thus, I'm especially concerned with non-positivist ideas and approaches and I'm keen on learning useful tools to overcome the current absolute lack of any sort of "middle-range theory" when facing the Iberian later prehistoric record. My current interests also include Early Middle Ages.

At the moment I hold an IEF Marie Curie fellowship to develop some of these concerns through the post-doctoral research project entitled: “Materiality and depositional practices in the later Prehistory in Europe: an interdisciplinary approach using central Iberia (Spain) record as a case study”. Therefore I am about to start a complete training program in re-fitting methodology and the cultural biography of material culture with Dr. John Chapman at Durham University (UK). Those approaches will allow for the ‘deliberate fragmentation premise’ to be tested in the Iberian archaeological record from a coherent and comprehensive long-term research programme almost for the first time. I expect to achieve a more nuanced understanding of the prehistoric material record and the actual 'otherness' of those prehistoric people, focusing on Bell Beaker and Later Bronze Age ceramic assemblages.

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