Dr Armando Falcucci

My teaching strives to integrate theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of the human deep past. I place particular emphasis on hands-on engagement with material culture through the courses "The Analysis of Palaeolithic Stone Tool Assemblages" and "Experimental Archaeology: The Social Prehistory of Technology". Through the course "Human Origins", students gain crucial insights into the biocultural evolution of early hominins. Finally, the course "Introduction to European Prehistory" shows the dramatic changes in subsistence, social organisation, material worlds and cosmology over the last 10,000 years leading up to the emergence of Rome as a major European power.

I am a Palaeolithic archaeologist with a broad interest in Late Pleistocene hominin behaviour. I completed my BA in Cultural Heritage Sciences at the University of Rome II (Italy), with a year abroad at the University of Granada (Spain). A dissertation on the demise of the late Neanderthals across the Iberian Peninsula cemented my passion for Palaeolithic archaeology. This led to an MA in Quaternary, Prehistory and Archaeology at the University of Ferrara (Italy), with extended study and research stays at the University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès (France) and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel). At Ferrara, I started working on the Aurignacian thanks to Prof. Marco Peresani, who allowed me to work on the flagship site of Grotta di Fumane in the Venetian Prealps. My skills in fieldwork and lithic technology were further honed under the mentorship of Prof. Marie Soressi (Leiden University) and Prof. François Bon (University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès). This work expanded further through a PhD at the University of Tübingen (Germany), under the supervision of Prof. Nicholas Conard.

Between 2020 and 2025, I led the research project Investigating Early Upper Palaeolithic technological variability and cultural dynamics south of the Alps, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), which resulted in the reanalysis of pivotal stratigraphic sequences across Italy to better understand the biocultural processes that led to the formation and development of the Upper Palaeolithic. During this period, I conducted a funded research stay at Harvard University (USA) to analyse the lithic assemblage from the site of Ksâr 'Akil in Lebanon. I further expanded this work through a research stay at the University of Arizona (USA), where I had the privilege of working alongside Prof. Steven Kuhn to investigate the dispersal of early Homo sapiens across the Mediterranean Basin.

In 2024, I was awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellowship for the RStone project (overall score of 100%), which I carried out between 2025 and 2026 at New York University (USA) and ICArEHB (Portugal). While I had to terminate this grant to join the University of Southampton in 2026, I am still working on MIS 3 southern African assemblages and developing new replicable methods in lithic analysis.