Dominic Stratford

Adjunct Lecturer
Ph.D., University of Witwatersrand, South Africa, 2011

Email: dominic.stratford@stonybrook.edu

Teaching

Courses taught at Stony Brook include: ANT277 - The Origins of Art, ANT290 - Science & Technology in Ancient Society

Research Interests

I am a geoarchaeologist focusing on stratigraphy and site formation processes on southern African archaeological and palaeoanthropological sites. I specialize in the study of cave and rock shelter sediments, but have worked on a diverse spectrum of fossil- and artefact-bearing sites, from arid, open landscapes to buried river gravels. One of the aspects I really enjoy about geoarchaeology is that it is fundamentally a multi-disciplinary field, often requiring the application of many different types of analyses drawn from archaeology and earth sciences to solve four dimensional puzzles. The goal is to be able to isolate human behavioral signals from the effects of abundant natural processes so we can better understand the wide range of human activities within their environments. As a geoarchaeologist, I apply these analyses to numerous southern African contexts, from the Namib Desert to numerous rockshelters and caves that contain deposits spanning the last 3.5 million years. In my capacity as Director of Research at the Sterkfontein Caves, my goal is to facilitate new and innovative research on all evidence, from multi-scale analysis of StW 573 and three-dimensional spatial analysis of fossils and stone tools, to augmented reality applications in science education. 

For more details on Dr. Stratford's research, please visit his Google Scholar profile.