Environmental Archaeology

Associate Professor


Giovanni Boschian studied Geology at the University of Trieste, pursuing a lifelong interest for Archaeology. He is full professor of Anthropology at the Department of Biology at the University of Pisa, where he teaches Anthropology, Geoarchaeology and Human Ecology. He is also Senior Research Associate at the Palaeo-Research Institute of the University of Johannesburg and has been Beaufort Visiting Scholar at St. John’s College, University of Cambridge. His research focusses on interactions between humans and environment in the (deep) past, with the scope of explaining behavioural/cultural adaptations to environmental change. He is strongly committed to fieldwork, where he applies geoarchaeological techniques to the study of site formation processes and -more generally- to reconstructing the human imprint on archaeological sediments. He is studying the reaction of environment and populations to cold phases, with special interest about the substitution of Neandertals with Ancient Modern Humans in the Western Balkans. Another topic regards the environmental effects of the spread of Neolithic pastoralism in southern Europe. He collaborates with the University of Venice and the Ilyia University of Tbilisi (Georgia) in studying site and landscape use by Late Chalcolithic-Early Bronze Age cultures of Transcaucasia. In Africa, he is studying the contexts and evolution of Early Pleistocene Hominins in Tanzania at Olduvai Gorge, where he co-directs an Italian excavation mission, and in South Africa within the Cradle of Humankind and in the Easten Cape province.