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Elizabeth Sawchuk

Elizabeth Sawchuk is a Postdoctoral Fellow and Research Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Stony Brook University (The State University of New York). She is a bioarchaeologist who studies the biological and social impacts of the spread of food production across sub-Saharan Africa. She conducts archaeological research in Kenya, Tanzania, and Zambia to understand the different ways in which people adopted herding and farming, and the environmental and cultural contexts of these transitions. Her work combines diverse evidence from human remains, ancient DNA, mortuary contexts, material culture, and ethnographic records to understand how people cope with periods of major change and what lessons we can learn from the past. She is currently a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Postdoctoral Fellow and Research Assistant Professor at Stony Brook University in New York, and an Affiliated Researcher with the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (MPI-SHH) in Jena, Germany.