Dr Amanda Henry is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Archaeology. She has been developing the use of plant microremains from archaeological contexts as markers of diet. She has explored differences in the plant food consumption between Neanderthals and Early Modern Humans, and has looked at the kinds of foods our very early australopith ancestors ate.

More information about Amanda Henry

Office days

Monday to Friday

Research

I am broadly interested in the role of diet in shaping our evolutionary history, with a particular interest in plant foods and food processing techniques. Using models derived from behavioral ecology, I explore how the nutritional quality and availability of certain foods may have structured how, when, and where humans developed our unique biological and behavioral traits. I take an explicitly interdisciplinary approach, combining laboratory analyses of plant remains and other biomolecules preserved in dental calculus, with ethnographic and experimental archaeological studies to understand why certain foods may be chosen over others.

Teaching activities

I teach in the Master's program in Archaeological Sciences, primarily the introductory and capstone courses. I also offer internships and supervise BA, MA and RMA theses. If you're interested in doing a project with me, please feel free to send me an email.

Curriculum vitae

I was educated in the North American "four fields" Anthropology system, combining archaeology, cultural anthropology, physical anthropology, and linguistics. For my undergraduate degree at Brown University, I excavated at the Petra Great Temple. I received my PhD from The George Washington University in 2010, for a dissertation on the dietary differences between Neanderthals and Modern Humans. From 2011 until 2017, I was an independent group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, affiliated with the department of Human Evolution. In 2017 I joined the Faculty of Archaeology at Leiden.

Publications