Shumon Hussain wins EAA Student Award
The 2016 EAA student award was won by Leiden Archaeology PhD candidate Shumon Hussain.
The annual prize for the best paper presented at the EAA conference by a student or archaeologist, working on a dissertation was announced at the Opening Ceremony of the conference.
The winning paper was entitled: Gazing at Owls? The Role of Human-Strigiform Interfaces in the Gravettian of East-Central Europe. In his paper Hussain considers the ecological and cultural background to human-owl relations during the Gravettian period in Southern Moravia. It argues that the recurrence of owls in the visual culture of the Gravettian is the result of unique conditions of encounter and interaction that emerged from a combination of Gravettian Socio-cultural behaviour, the specific climates and environments of late Marine Isotope Stage 3 East-Central Europe, and the distinctive behaviour of owls within these. This research successfully combines theory drawn environmental humanities with a wide-ranging approach to the data.
The Award consists of a diploma and one or more book vouchers. The winning paper will be considered for publication in the European Journal of Archaeology (EJA).