Rate My Professor Marta Diaz-Guardamino

Marta Diaz-Guardamino is Associate Professor in Archaeology at Durham University and Digital Visualization Lab Manager. She joined the Department of Archaeology in 2018 after serving as Lecturer in Archaeology at Cardiff University from 2016 to 2018. Previously, she held research and teaching positions at the University of Southampton, including postdoctoral researcher on a Spanish Government-funded project from 2011 and Research Associate on the Leverhulme Trust-funded 'Making a Mark: Imagery and process in the British and Irish Neolithic' project from 2014 to 2016. She earned her PhD in 2010 from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid on Iberian prehistoric sculpture and its European context, receiving the Extraordinary Doctoral Award 2009/2010 from the Faculty of Humanities. During her doctoral studies, she benefited from scholarships including an Education Abroad Program at the University of California, Berkeley, a DAAD scholarship at Johann-Wolfgang Goethe University and the Roman-Germanic Commission in Frankfurt-am-Main, and a Caja Madrid Foundation grant.

Her research focuses on late prehistoric connectivity, social relations, monuments, and art in Atlantic Europe from the 6th to 1st millennia BCE, employing archaeometric methods, digital technologies, and theoretical approaches to explore mobility of people, animals, things, and knowledge, as well as biographical perspectives on landscapes, monuments, and material culture. She is Principal Investigator of the Leverhulme Trust-funded Megalithic Origins project (2024-2027, £378,009), examining the emergence of megalithic monumentality in Neolithic Western Europe through international fieldwork in France, Portugal, Italy, and state-of-the-art dating. Diaz-Guardamino leads Subproject 4 of the Maritime Encounters project on long-distance interactions in the Late Bronze Age and is Co-Investigator on the Swedish Research Council-funded Rock Art, Words and Warriors (RAW) project. Her fieldwork directs excavations at Bronze Age funerary and mining sites such as Cañaveral de León in Huelva, Spain. Key publications include co-authored books Bronze Age Rock Art in Iberia and Scandinavia: Words, Warriors and Long-distance Metal Trade (Oxbow Books, 2024) and Making a Mark: Image and Process in Neolithic Britain and Ireland (Oxbow Books, 2019), alongside highly cited articles such as Assembling the Dead, Gathering the Living: radiocarbon dating and Bayesian modelling for Copper Age Valencina de la Concepción (Journal of World Prehistory, 2018) and RTI and the study of engraved rock art (Digital Applications in Archaeology and Cultural Heritage, 2015). She teaches on British, Iberian, European, and World prehistory from Neolithic to Bronze Age, and digital visualization techniques.