New doctoral fellow appointed by the DOMINO-CLIMATE project: Máté Merkl

We are pleased to inform you that Máté Merkl joined the DOMINO-CLIMATE team in January 2024. He is a PhD student at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) and he also works at Kuny Domokos Museum in Tata.

As an archaeobotanist, his main research interests are the identification of prehistoric plant macrobotanical assembalges (anthracological and carpological) from the area of the present-day Hungary. In scope of the Domino-Climate Project he studies Neolithic and Copper Age wood charcoal assemblages from the Great Hungarian Plain and Transdanibia. His main research question is how the Neolithic and Copper Age woodland composition of these areas looked like, what woody species were preferred by the prehistoric societies for house construction and firewood collection, and how woodland composition changed between 3000 and 5000 BC in the Carpathian Basin. He also studies carpological assemblages from Neolithic and Copper Age sites, where he focuses on the weed and cereal assemblages.