Jessica Smyth

I joined the UCD School of Archaeology as Lecturer in 2016, the institution where I first graduated in Archaeology and Italian. In my research career to date I have worked in Ireland and the UK and across the university and heritage sectors. Following postgraduate research, I worked for the Heritage Council (2007-2009) editing the Brú na Bóinne World Heritage Site Research Framework, before returning to UCD as an IRCHSS Postdoctoral Fellow (2009-2010). In 2011, I relocated to the UK with a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship for Career Development, based within the Organic Geochemistry Unit at the University of Bristol. This funded a two-year programme of organic residue analysis of Irish Neolithic pottery. In 2013, I joined the ‘Times of Their Lives’ project team (ERC Advanced Grant 2011-2016) at Cardiff University, which aimed to construct more precise chronologies for the European Neolithic through problem-oriented archaeological analysis and Bayesian statistical modelling. In 2014, I returned to the University of Bristol to join ‘NeoMilk’ (ERC Advanced Grant 2013-2018), a project that explored the introduction and spread of cattle-based agriculture by the earliest farming groups in central Europe. I am currently Principal Investigator on 'Passage Tomb People' (IRC Laureate Consolidator Grant 2018-2022), investigating the social drivers of passage tomb construction in the 4th and 3rd millennia BC.