Fabio Silva

Senior Lecturer in Archaeological Modelling, Bournemouth University
I am Senior Lecturer in Archaeological Modelling at Bournemouth University and co-founder and co-editor of the Journal of Skyscape Archaeology. My research interest is how societies perceive and conceive their world(s) and used that to time and adjust social, productive and magico-religious behaviours, especially in prehistory.

My research interests steered me along two distinct yet complementary strands: archaeological modelling and skyscape archaeology.

The first strand involves the modelling and analysis of cultural- and environmental-dependent dispersal dynamics, especially across large spatial and temporal scales. Large-scale dispersals have been a staple of archaeological research from its inception (e.g. spread of early hominids out of Africa, spread of domesticated crops and animals). I am especially interested in exploring them through the recovery of their dynamics (modes and routes of dispersal) via statistical analysis of chronometric, material and palaeoenvironmental data. This requires lateral thinking with innovative computational approaches that, nevertheless, are acutely aware of the nature, uncertainties and other limitations of the available data.

The second strand focuses on more regional scales and explores the skyscape archaeology of late prehistoric monuments. Structures such as Stonehenge in Wiltshire and Newgrange in Ireland are famous for having had celestial alignments encoded into their architecture. There is much speculation surrounding their intent, purpose and meaning, with interpretations often blurring the lines between scholarship and fantasy. On this front, I am not so interested in identifying and collecting celestial alignments but in understanding how they can help us peek into the ontologies of past societies, i.e. into how they conceived the world and their place in it. This takes careful, robust and reflexive approaches to the archaeological record – both qualitative and quantitative – which I am keen to not only explore but also develop.