Suzi Richer

Suzi is currently working in the Environment and Archaeology Departments in a liaison role on the ERC-funded project 'The Archaeology of Agricultural Resilience in Eastern Africa' (AAREA http://aarea-project.eu/). She is also the Publicity Officer for the Association for Environmental Archaeology (AEA http://envarch.net).

Suzi’s PhD thesis ‘From pollen to people: The interaction between people and their environment in the mid-to-high altitudes of the Southern French Alps’, combined palaeoecological (primarily pollen analysis) and archaeological techniques to understand how people used alpine valleys and high-altitude pastures. Maintaining an active interest in both pollen analysis and how people understood and used their environments in the past has meant that Suzi’s research is often cross- and inter-disciplinary. She is involved with research projects in Nepal and Worcestershire, UK examining environmental change and how people understood and made sense of the natural world in the past.

Previously, Suzi has worked as a Senior Environmental Archaeologist (pollen) within the commercial sector, and in communications roles for the National Trust and for Worcestershire Wildlife Trust. She also worked on the ERC-funded project ‘The Times of Their Lives’ (ToTL http://totl.eu/), undertaking Bayesian age-depth modelling on pollen profiles from southern England.

Suzi’s research interests combine the academic and professional elements of her career to date, namely the relationship between people and the natural world in the past and present. A secondary aspect of her research is how this relationship is understood and perpetuated by a variety of different audiences, including academic, indigenous/local communities, business/commercial sectors and policy makers/NGOs. 

Broader interests include:

• Environmental Archaeology (pollen analysis)
• Landscape Archaeology
• Theoretical Archaeology (posthumanism approaches)
• Chronologies (Bayesian modelling)
• World Archaeology (Africa, Mediterranean and South Asia)