PhD student Amanda Leiss awarded the Leakey Foundation Research Grant

January 2, 2018

Fourth year PhD student Amanda Leiss was recently awarded the Leakey Foundation Research Grant for her dissertation project titled: Paleoenvironmental context of Early Stone Age Archaeology: An analysis of the Gona fauna between ~3 and 1 Ma.  Amanda has been working at Gona, in Ethiopia, since 2010, in collaboration with the Gona Paleoanthropological Research Project.  Her project will be the first multiproxy systematic paleoenvironmental reconstruction using fauna from the Gona basin during this important time period (3-1 million years ago). Since Gona has the longest continuous record of Early Stone Age archaeology, including the oldest Oldowan and among the earliest occurrences of Acheulian in the archaeological record, this will provide an important context for the evolution of early Homo and development of stone tool technology. Amanda is heading to Ethiopia for her field season early in January in the New Year.