Dr Jo-Hannah Plug is Gerald Averay Wainwright Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Near Eastern Archaeology at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oxford. She is also Honorary Research Fellow at the Department of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology, University of Liverpool, Guest Researcher at the Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University, and member of the British Association of Near Eastern Archaeology (BANEA) steering committee.
Her NINO Visiting Research Fellowship allows her to make use of the excellent library resources and working facilities at the NINO, maintain her connections to Leiden University – her Alma Mater – and contribute to the research environments of the NINO, the LIAS, and the Faculty of Archaeology.
Dr Plug is an archaeologist of Southwest Asia with a particular interest in the radical social changes characterising the prehistoric periods of the region, which include developments in community structures, subsistence strategies, and ritual behaviours. She is particularly interested in studying social bonds through the reconstruction of past mortuary behaviours, living arrangements, and commensal practices. Her research is explicitly interdisciplinary, and she frequently employs science-based techniques (particularly isotope analyses) to approach archaeology-driven questions.
She obtained her BA and MA at Leiden University, specialising in Near Eastern and science-based archaeology, as well as museum studies. Following her MA, she worked as a research assistant at the Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University, in the project Consolidating Empire. Reconstructing Hegemonic Practices of the Middle Assyrian Empire at the Late Bronze Age Fortified Estate of Tell Sabi Abyad, Syria, ca. 1230–1180 BC. In her PhD Uncovering a Community: Investigating Lifestyles and Death Ways at Neolithic Tell Sabi Abyad, Syria – which she completed in 2021 at the Department of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology, University of Liverpool – she combined evidence relating to chronology, mortuary behaviour, taphonomy, demographics, diet, and mobility to achieve a better understanding of cultural change and community structure at Late Neolithic Tell Sabi Abyad, Syria. Subsequently, she worked as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Durham University and University of Liverpool-led project What’s in a House? Exploring the Kinship Structure of the World’s First Houses. Within this project, she focused specifically on the spatiotemporal variability of human mobility patterns across the main Neolithic transitions and the impact of such behaviours on group belonging.
Most recently, Dr Plug was awarded a G.A. Wainwright Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Near Eastern Archaeology at the University of Oxford for her research project On The Threshold Of Urbanism: Investigating 4th–3rd Millennium BCE Pınarbaşı into the social context that gave rise to the earliest cities in central Anatolia, which integrates archaeological (excavation and survey) and bioarchaeological (multi-isotope and aDNA) data from the Konya Plain. In the context of this research project, she directs yearly excavations of the 4th to 3rd millennium BCE layers at Pınarbaşı, under the flag of the wider Pınarbaşı Archaeological Project, led by University of Liverpool, Ankara Hacı Bayram Veli University and the Karaman Archaeological Museum.
