Niccolo’ Mazzucco

I am currently a position of Senior Research Fellow (RTDb) in Prehistory and Protohistory at the University of Pisa within the ‘Rientro dei Cervelli’ program. Previously, I have worked as contracted scientist at the Archaeology of Social Dynamics (ASD) research group of the Milá y Fontanals Institution (IMF, Barcelona) of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) within the Juan de la Cierva postdoc program (2020-2021) and, before, as Marie Sklodowska Curie-IF Fellow (2108-2020). Previsouly, as part of my postdoctoral experience (2015-2018), I have been working at UMR 7055 PréTech (CNRS and Université Paris Nanterre), at the Maison Archéologie & Ethnologie René-Ginouvès (Nanterre, France). My work in France was funded by a Fyssen Foundation grant and by a postdoc contract of the Univesité Paris Lumières.

Since my M.A. dissertation, in 2009, I focused my research on the study of the first farming communities of the Mediterranean, by analysing the palaeoeconomic aspects through the use-wear analysis of stone artefacts. I was formed in use-wear analysis at the University of Leiden, thanks to an Erasmus scholarship supervised by Anne Louise van Gijn. After that, I earned a 4-years PhD fellowship JAE-Pre at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) under the supervision of I. Clemente Conte and J.F. Gibaja. During my PhD, defended in 2014 at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, I developed a thesis to reconstruct the human occupation of the Pyrenean mountains, by analysing sites located at different altitudes, from Early to Late Neolithic. This research was carried out in collaboration with several interdisciplinary research projects focused on the integration of palaeoecological and archaeological proxies in order to assess the process of acculturation of high mountain landscapes. I directed and participated in the excavation of several high-altitude sites (Obagues de Raetera; Abrics del Portarró) and survey campaigns.

After my PhD, I started a new research line focused on the expansion of the first Neolithic agricultural technologies in the Central Mediterranean. This project included the study of agricultural tools from a large sample of archaeological contexts from the entire Mediterranean area, including cutting-edge technologies (i.e. confocal microscopy), experimental archaeology, and archaeological fieldworks.

Key-words: Neolithic; Mesolithic; Mediterranean; Near-East; Eastern Europe; Use-wear anaysis; Stone tools; Raw-materials; Farming; Agricultural tools; Technological innovations.