People
Anwen Cooper (PI)
Anwen Cooper’s research interests include later prehistoric Britain and north-west Europe, and interpretative approaches to landscape, material culture, and archaeological practice. After ten years as a fieldwork practitioner from 1996-2006, her PhD investigated knowledge production in British prehistory during a key period in archaeology’s ‘professionalisation’ from 1970-2010. Anwen has most recently worked as a postdoctoral researcher on the ERC-funded English Landscape and Identities project (University of Oxford), the AHRC-funded Prehistoric Grave Goods and Boundary Objects projects (Universities of Manchester & Reading), and the Leverhulme-funded Ebb and Flow project (University of Oxford). She also collaborated with colleagues at the Cambridge Archaeological Unit in writing up the excavation and analysis of the spectacular Late Bronze Age pile-dwelling settlement at Must Farm, Cambridgeshire.
anwen.cooper@oxfordarchaeology.com
Tina Roushannafas
Tina specialises in ancient plant remains (archaeobotany), having completed an environmental archaeology master’s in 2016/7 and worked as an archaeobotanical lab technician in 2018/9, both at the University of Oxford. She has several years’ experience in developer-funded archaeology, starting out as a field archaeologist and later working as a project officer specialising in environmental sampling/analysis. While particularly interested in prehistoric and early medieval Britain, she has worked on a range of assemblages, including Neolithic and Bronze Age sites in the Near East. Her research interests include the uses of wild plants, diversification and resilience in crop cultivation and open science practices. Always keen to adapt to new computer-based approaches, her PhD research utilised geometric morphometrics (statistics-based shape analysis) to explore diversity in archaeobotanical wheat remains.
tina.roushannafas@oxfordarchaeology.com
Lou Matthews
Lou is an established professional archaeologist with an academic background in Environmental Archaeology (pollen analysis) and, latterly, palaeolimnology. Lou ran Historic Environment Records in South Yorkshire (2003-2010) and North Yorkshire (2010-2015), before a working for the Archaeology Data Service as Collections Development Manager (2015-2018). In 2023, she completed her PhD in Physical Geography ‘Iron Age Palaeoenvironments of Northwest Scotland’ which involved a multi-proxy analysis (pollen, carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis and X-ray florescence) of loch sediment records. Lou is a hybrid worker, living in York. Online meetings have a 60% chance of a cameo from her two cats.
louisa.matthews@oxfordarchaeology.com
Alice Dobinson
Alice is a Bioarchaeologist specialising in ancient DNA and stable isotope analysis. She is a current part-time DPhil student in Archaeological Science at the University of Oxford working with the Palaeogenomics and Bioarchaeology Research Network (PalaeoBARN) to explore human-animal relationships in the past. Her research focus on the processes and complexities of animal domestication and on the dynamism of these relationships across time and space. She has a BSc in Archaeology with Forensic Science from the University of Exeter (2020), an MSc in Archaeological Science from the University of Oxford (2022), and has worked through several positions in public engagement for museums, archives, and archaeological excavations.
alice.dobinson@oxfordarchaeology.com
Martyn Allen
Martyn has been a Senior Project Manager at OA since 2018. He manages the post-excavation of archaeological projects, bringing to conclusion the results of fieldwork for clients, often to publication. Martyn specialises in the study of late Iron Age and Roman Britain, especially in the fields of rural settlement and agriculture, and he is an experienced zooarchaeologist (animal bone specialist). Martyn currently sits on the Britannia Editorial Committee for The Roman Society.
After gaining a BA (Hons) in Archaeology from the University of Winchester in 2004, Martyn went on to complete an MA in Osteoarchaeology at the University of Southampton in 2006, and then a PhD at the University of Nottingham in 2010. Before joining OA in 2017, Martyn worked for Historic England as a Research Assistant in Zooarchaeology and, between 2012 and 2016, was employed as a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Reading.
martyn.allen@oxfordarchaeology.com
Wider OA Team
Sharon Cook
David Kay
Julia Meen
Rebecca Nicholson
Adrienne Powell
Liz Stafford
Leo Webley
