Mes recherches portent sur l’évolution des communautés de petits mammifères d’Afrique depuis la fin du Pliocène jusqu’à aujourd’hui. J’aborde plus particulièrement des questions concernant la taxinomie des rongeurs, et l’utilisation des assemblages fossiles à des fins de reconstruction paléoenvironnementale et d’outil biochronologique.

Pour y répondre, j’utilise différentes approches combinant mes connaissances en paléontologie, en anatomie et en écologie, ainsi que des outils de morphométrie géométrique et de machine learning.

Les assemblages que j’étudie proviennent principalement d’Afrique du Sud et du Botswana, et j’aimerais prochainement comparer les structures et dynamiques des communautés d’Afrique australe avec celles d’Afrique du Nord et de l’Est.

Research themes: Late Pleistocene and early Holocene hunter-gatherer societies in Africa. I am interested in the organization of hunter-gatherer lithic technology, especially stone procurement. My research explores how technological organization can be studied to understand the major evolutionary and demographic changes of the last hundred-thousand years in Africa.

I am a prehistorian who performs archaeological research along the eastern African Rift system in order to reconstruct the dynamics of human settlement in relation to the emergence of new technical practices, new behavioural skills and related paleoenvironments, from the early hominins bearing the Oldowan culture to the early ‘Homo sapiens’ groups, authors of the Middle Stone Age, i.e. from ca. 2.3 million years to 30 thousand years before present.

My research focuses on very ancient archaeological sites (Oldowan) and aims to understand the production, function, and preservation of stone tools made by hominins living within the East African Rift. My field of research is currently located in the Lower Omo Valley (Shungura Formation) in association with members of the Omo Group Research Expedition.

My research focuses on the subsistence behaviors of Plio-Pleistocene hominins, in particular the role of hunting, scavenging and the use and consumption of animal resources during the evolution of the human lineage.

For this, I study bone assemblages mainly from South Africa and Angola. I am also undertaking field research in Zimbabwe and Botswana.

Sonia Harmand is an archaeologist and the director of the Mission Préhistorique au Kenya / West Turkana Archaeological Project in Kenya. Her research focuses on reconstructing the skills and cognition of the earliest tool-making hominins in Africa, and particularly pre-Homo species.

She is also interested in biomechanics involved in stone tool production, as well as primate archaeology.

Lamya Khalidi is a researcher in archaeology with the French CNRS at the CEPAM laboratory in Nice. A Cambridge University graduate, she has 25 years of experience in Middle East and African archaeology and currently leads the VAPOR-Afar fieldwork project in Ethiopia. Her research examines human-landscape interactions in the context of the development of the first production societies, principally during periods of Neolithization and of the establishment of the first proto-urban societies in the Middle East and in the Horn of Africa. Her research focuses particularly on fingerprinting obsidian circulation to study the dynamics of mobility, contact and exchange in the African Horn and the Arabian Peninsula and the links that existed between these regions, the Middle East and North Africa.

Fieldwork Projects:

• VAPOR-Afar, Ethiopie (dir. L. Khalidi)
• AGXIM TelluS-Rift, Ethiopia (dir. C. Doubre)
• LSA Sequence in Ethiopia, Ethiopia (dir. C. Ménard)
• PSPCA, Republic of Djibouti (dir. J. Cauliez)
• Kadrouka, Sudan (dir. O. Langlois, Ph. Chambon, P. Sellier)

Research Projects:

• 2021 – in progress: Partenaire dans l’ANR ‘Nilafar’ (PI M. Revel)
• 2021: UCAJedi Idex ‘CORETEX’ (PI L. Khalidi, M. Gabriele)