Eslem Ben Arous

I am an African Pleistocene Geochronologist and Archaeologist interested in building the timeline of human occupations in Africa over the last 600,000 years. My main research focuses on using and developing the ESR dating (quartz and enamel), U-series (enamel) and OSL dating (quartz) to date ESA and MSA sites. My ongoing research aims at pushing back the limits of the ESR dating method in several African regions (northwestern, western, central and southern).

After my PhD at the MNHN (Paris, France) that I got in 2019, I joined the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena (Germany), specifically the Pan-African Evolution Research Group (now the Human Palaeosystems Research Group) under the direction of Eleanor Scerri. I was a Fyssen Postdoctoral Fellow (2020-2022) and also a Postdoctoral Researcher (2022-2023) pilot project to investigate the potential of paired ESR and OSL dating on MSA sites located in West African Tropical forest.

I am currently a MSCA Fellow (2023-2025) under the supervision of Mathieu Duval with the project WATIME "West African Middle Stone Age Timeline using ESR dating of quartz" (https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101107408) which aims to establish the ESR chronology of West African Acheulean and MSA.