There is no formal membership structure in EAI. We meet informally and remotely to discuss issues that arise in the practice of environmental archaeology in Ireland.
Our current list of members includes:
Dr Meriel McClatchie
Meriel is an Associate Professor at UCD School of Archaeology. She is an archaeobotanist whose research interests include European archaeology, food (from early prehistoric to early modern societies), and prehistoric landscapes and settlements. She is the director of the UCD Ancient Foods Research Group and the UCD Archaeobotany Laboratory.
Mick Monk
Mick is a retired lecturer of Environmental Archaeology in the Department of Archaeology, University College Cork. His speciality is archaeobotany but he also has an interest in all areas of environmental archaeology as a central concern of the interaction between past peoples and their environment in particular via agriculture and settlement choice particularly for the 1st into the 2nd millennium AD (in Ireland). Mick is also more specifically interested in the processing of cereals (corn-drying kilns) and interactions between early urban communities and their hinterlands.
Orla-Peach Power
Orla-Peach is a science communicator and researcher based at MaREI, the SFI Centre for Energy, Climate and Marine, University College Cork. She is a co-founder of Digital Heritage Age where she works as a digital heritage specialist in participatory cultural heritage projects, employing 3D methods such as photogrammetry and laser scanning. She is a board member and co-founder of Heritage Voice a group of professionals advocating for the importance and value of Ireland’s archaeological, built, and cultural heritage, and the Work In Heritage Twitter programme that aims to highlight the diversity of work undertaken in the heritage and archaeological sector. Orla-Peach is also an editor for the EXARC Journal.
Further Information | The Pallasboy Project | Viral Archive Project | Sheela-na-Gig3D
Róisín O’Droma
Roisin is a recently qualified archaeobotanist working in commercial archaeology with the Irish Archaeological Consultancy (IAC). Her main research interests include food crops and weeds from prehistoric European archaeology.
Ellen O Carroll
Ellen is an environmental archaeologist with specialisms in wood and charcoal species identification, and the analysis of microfossil remains including pollen, microscopic charcoal, and non-pollen environmental indicators from archaeological excavations. Her main research interests are long-term vegetation dynamics and landscape change, management and use of forest systems, and the impacts of climatic change. Ellen co-authored the extensive document on guidelines for the retrieval, analysis and reporting of plant macro-remains, wood and charcoal from archaeological deposits, and the use and applicability of pollen analysis and associated proxies for Transport Infrastructure Ireland.
Further Information | Email | FoodCult Project | Irish Bog Bodies Project
David Stone
David is an environmental archaeologist and researcher specialising in the archaeobotany of Ireland and the Southern Caucasus. He is an experienced archaeologist providing specialist analyses of plant macro remains to both the commercial archaeology sector and University Departments. His main research interests focus on agricultural practice in early medieval–medieval Ireland and the Sasanian–Islamic periods in Azerbaijan, especially the history of the cultivation of barley, millet and rice. He completed his PhD at University College Dublin in 2021 and is a former student of the Institute of Archaeology & Kellogg College at the University of Oxford. He is also a Fulbright Ireland scholar and former Smithsonian Fellow at the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) in Washington DC.
Further Information | Twitter | Instagram | Fulbright Ireland
Daisy Spencer
Daisy is an environmental archaeologist and specialist in both pollen and chironomid analysis, with past experience in soil micromorphology and aDNA. Currently a postdoctoral researcher within the Palaeoenvironmental Research Unit (@PalaeoGalway) at the University of Galway, her research is focused on the prehistoric landscape of the bluestone quarries in Preseli, south-west Wales, as part of the wider Origins of Stonehenge project. Previous research focused on palynological and palaeolimnological (chironomid and lake geochemistry) investigations of Lough Inchiquin and Rosroe Lough, western Ireland throughout prehistory, assessing both landscape change and erosion.
Daisy has undertaken pollen work for commercial companies, and on behalf of Transport Infrastructure Ireland, with projects including the N4 road scheme and high-status medieval settlement of Drumclay Crannog. Her expertise allows her to undertake full palynological investigations including sediment core extraction and to produce Environmental Remains Strategy reports in advance of commercial excavations. Daisy has excavated across Ireland, the UK, Greece, Libya and Egypt.
Robert Power
Robert is an archaeobotanist at UCD School of Archaeology, specialising in using microbotanical remains to study forager and early farming societies in Ireland, Europe, and Africa. He uses human dental calculus and archaeological sediment to reconstruct diet and subsistence patterns. He completed his PhD at the University of Leiden and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
Eva Kourela
Eva is a PhD student at UCD school of Archaeology. She has a background in environmental archaeology with a specialism in entomology and data analysis. She has worked in Ireland as an archaeologist in the commercial sector, and as research assistant in archaeoentomology at UCD. Her interests are in the reconstruction of past landscapes, parasitic interactions and health indicators.
Erin Crowley-Champoux
Erin is a zooarchaeologist with research interests in faunal analysis, the archaeology of food and foodways, and the relationship between community development and agricultural and political economies. She has worked on archaeological projects in Ireland, the eastern and midwestern United States and Peru. She is currently a scientific researcher on the FOODSEC Project in UCD’s School of Archaeology, examining evidence of food remains from the Bronze Age.
Penny Johnston
Penny’s research interests range from archaeobotany to oral history and ethnography. She is currently based at UCD School of Archaeology and she is working on the FOODSEC project along with EAI colleagues Meriel McClatchie and Erin Crowley-Champoux.
Further information & contact details
Fiona Beglane, Steve Davis, Ben Gearey, Nikolah Gilligan, Susan Lyons, Roisin Navin, Lorna O’Donnell and Don O’Meara are also members.
If you would like to join our group, please get in touch!
