Eduardo Herrera Malatesta is a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Archaeology.

More information about Eduardo Herrera Malatesta

Current research

Eduardo is part of Alex Geurds’ project Resilience as human–environmental engagement: Sustainability in pre-Columbian Central America (VICI-NWO). Within this fascinating project, Eduardo’s research will focus on addressing three of the VICI’s main aims, i.e., to explore the ways of how humans relate to local flora and fauna, area-wide patterns of historically documented human-environmental relations, and distinctive forms of depicting surroundings through material culture. For this, two case studies will be explore. First, the Muisca territory, located in the region of Cundinarmarca (Colombia), where he will use advanced spatial statistical methods to assess how the settlement pattern might or might not be related to agricultural practices in the past. The second case study will be in the region of the Colombian and Venezuelan llanos, where he will use a combination of dataset to explore the human adaptation and responses to this challenging environment.
This project will create an interdisciplinary database using existing archaeological, ethnographical, linguistic, and ethnohistorical data, as well as environmental data coming from geomorphology, geology, soils, precipitation index, and water sources. Since all attributes will have spatial information, this database will be easily able to be integrated into a GIS environment and benefit from the powerful analytical tools of this system. To further analyse this large-scale and complex database, a series of spatial statistical and spatial network analyses will be considered. This spatiotemporal multiscalar approach will allow the understanding of the development of societies through time and space and its relationship with the landscape. Even more, the models to be created will allow us to understand how the small and linguistically diverse groups inhabiting today’s Colombia were successful at mitigating the impact of regional geographical challenges and changes in the area and maintaining societal stability.

Curriculum vitae

Eduardo Herrera Malatesta is a Venezuelan archaeologist specialising in landscape research, regional analyses, and computational archaeology, specifically geographical information systems (GIS) and spatial statistics. He studied anthropology with a specialisation in archaeology at the Universidad Central de Venezuela (BA) and the Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Cientificas (MA). He then specialised in GIS in archaeology at University College London (MSc), and later, he got his PhD in archaeology at Leiden University. He has held postdoctoral positions at Leiden University and at Aarhus University as a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow. He has recently started a position as a postdoctoral researcher at Leiden University.

Publications