Professor Jessica Thompson Awarded Leakey Foundation Grant

Assistant Professor Jessica Thompson was awarded a Leakey Foundation grant to support fieldwork in the Kasitu Valley of Malawi in 2021. The grant will enable her team to excavate deeper into deposits at Mazinga 1, the oldest archaeological site in Malawi known to have preserved organic materials such as fossil bone and shell. This work will produce the first detailed sequence of human behavior and paleoenvironments across major climate shifts of the last 30 thousand years, and potentially longer.