Valentina Azzarà is an honorary research fellow at the Faculty of Archaeology.

More information about Valentina Azzarà

Research

Valentina Azzarà is currently the Head of the Social Sciences & Humanities at the Netherlands eScience Center, a public research institute specializing in cutting-edge digital technologies, and the Director and founder of the field school Time of Magan, with A. De Rorre.

Her research investigates social complexity and the development of economic diversification and labour specialization in harsh environments, with a focus on the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age non-urban societies of South-Eastern Arabia. She is a specialist of architecture and settlement archaeology, and one of the leading experts in prehistoric coastal archaeology in the area. Her long-term research programme at Ras al-Jinz, Oman, is contributing critical new data on coastal socio-ecological systems during the Mid/Late Holocene transition, tracing uninterrupted occupation of the area since c. 5000 BCE. Offering insights into how communities adapted to environmental and cultural challenges over time, this site provides a unique lens to study long-term societal development.

Integrating data from Ras al-Jinz with findings from other major sites investigated through long-term projects in Oman, Valentina’s research emphasizes the dynamics of household production and consumption, the organisation and social significance of space, and the specialisation of labour as revealed through architectural remains and techno-complexes uncovered at these sites. This approach sheds light on the progressive transformations and the long-term trajectory of increasing specialization and social structuring of Early Bronze Age populations.

Challenging dominant narratives of external pressures as the primary driver of socio-economic complexity in the region, Valentina adopts a bottom-up perspective to explore how South-Eastern Arabian populations independently developed economic diversification and social inequalities during late prehistory. Through analysis of activity indicators and their relationship to the built environment, she investigates how economic specialization shaped socio-cultural dynamics in communities without elite control or sponsorship, refining our understanding of prehistoric coastal societies of SE Arabia and their development.

Curriculum vitae

Valentina Azzarà held a PhD in Archaeology-Ethnology-Prehistory at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, a postdoctorate at the UMR 7041 ArScAn (MAE, Nanterre), and a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions H2020 COFUND LEaDing Fellows Programme postdoctorate at the Faculty of Archaeology of Leiden University. She is a National Geographic Explorer and a NGS former grantee, a member of the Steering Committee of the Seminar for Arabian Studies, and a member of the advisory boards of the Dutch SSH Thematic Digital Competences Center and of the UNIGIS Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
Valentina was a member of different archaeological projects in Southern Europe, North Africa and West Asia, and directed/codirected fieldwork at various sites in Oman, Egypt, Tunisia, Turkmenistan since the early stages of her career. Since 2017, she has been the scientific director of the Ras al Jinz Project (Time of Magan), for which she secured multiple funding.  

Publications