PhD student Amanda Leiss was recently awarded the Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant for her project titled: Paleoenvironmental context of Early Stone Age Archaeology: An analysis of the Gona fauna between ~3 and 1 Ma. Along with dissertation grants from the Leakey Foundation, the Yale MacMillan Center, and the Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies she has successfully secured funding for her multiproxy analysis to reconstruct the paleoenvironment at Gona, a field site in Ethiopia with the longest continuous record of Early Stone Age archaeology, and test for patterns of hominin habitat use between 3 and 1 million years, when early human first began making stone tools. Amanda has been working at Gona, in Ethiopia, since 2010 in collaboration with the Gona Paleoanthropological Research Project. She just returned from a successful field season where she nearly doubled her sample size of fossils from this important time period. She will return to Ethiopia this summer to continue her research and take samples to be used for isotopic analyses thanks to these funding agencies. “