Regina Gonda

Regina joined the PAST project as a PhD researcher in September 2014. Regina has a BSc in Agricultural Engineering in Environmental Management from Szent István University, Hungary, and an MSc in Environmental Management, specialising in the Management of Natural Resources, from Kiel University, Germany.

In her PhD project Regina applies a multidisciplinary approach. She combines archaeology, archaeobotany and terrestrial palaeoecology to the study of different pre-Columbian land use systems in the middle Madeira-Purus interfluves in Central Amazonia, in order to assess their modern environmental legacy.

Regina has a deep interest in the impact of long-term human-environment interactions on cultural landscapes, especially with regard to the emergence and development of agriculture in its broadest sense, including agroforestry. She believes that only interdisciplinary approaches are able to shed light on the complexity of coupled human-environment systems and on how they change through time.

In her PhD research in the PAST project Regina is very excited to learn and apply archaeobotanical methods (phytolith and charcoal analysis) and combine them with other techniques in order to better understand how and to what extent pre-Columbian populations of the middle Purus-Madeira interfluves transformed their environment in the late Holocene.

More info about Regina and her research: http://eprofile.exeter.ac.uk/reginagonda