Madella, Marco

Biography

After graduating at the University of Milan (Italy) in Natural Sciences (Botany), he worked as a contract scientist at the Archaeological Museum of Como and left the team in 1993 to start a PhD at the University of Cambridge. After finishing his PhD he took up a position as research fellow at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, also teaching archaeology and human evolution at the Institute for Continuing Education (Madingly Hall) of the University of Cambridge. In 2004 he became affiliated lecturer in the Department of Archaeology and in 2005 director of studies in archaeology and anthropology at St. Edmund's College in the University of Cambridge. Since July 2005 He is s ICREA research professor first at the IMF-CSIC and from 2014 at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. He currently coordinate the Complexity and Socio-Ecological Dynamics (CaSEs) research group.

Research Interest

His background is in archaeobotany and environmental archaeology, and he investigated the socio-ecological dynamics of past human populations from Mediterranean to tropical environments. His interests span from past vegetation histories, the modelling and simulation of processes in human behavioural change, people-plants co-evolutionary dynamics, long term trajectories of biodiversity and sustainability in prehistoric societies, and the origin and resilience of agriculture. Agriculture had an immense impact on humans and non-humans, and the future of our world is linked to making agriculture sustainable by maintaining biodiversity, revaluating traditional knowledge and mitigating environmental impact. Key areas for my work are South and West Asia, and South America.