Rate My Professor Wei Chu

Dr. Wei Chu serves as Assistant Professor and researcher at the Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University, affiliated with World Archaeology. A geoarchaeologist, he specializes in the relationship between material culture, site formation processes, and past environments, focusing on lithic taphonomy, sedimentary context, and environmental factors shaping archaeological assemblages. His research integrates field observation, geoarchaeological sampling, experimental archaeology, and laboratory analysis, with a regional emphasis on the Late Pleistocene of East-Central Europe to examine human spatial organization during climatic and cultural transitions. Key publications include the co-edited volume Intent on the Paleolithic: papers in honour of Prof. Dr. Wil Roebroeks (Analecta Praehistorica Leidensia 55, Sidestone Press, 2025) and articles such as Sterile stones: experimental and spatial analysis of heated lithics to reconstruct Late Pleistocene fire use at Româneşti-Dumbrăviţa I (Romania) (Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 71, 2026), A revised radiocarbon chronology for the mammoth bone structures and associated features at Mezhyrich, Ukraine (Open Research Europe 5, 2025), Interactions in bones but not stone: anomalous cultural transmission gaps in Romania's Middle to Upper Paleolithic Transition (Quaternary Science Reviews 329, 2024), and The Danube corridor hypothesis and the Carpathian Basin: geological, environmental and archaeological approaches to characterizing Aurignacian dynamics (Journal of World Prehistory 31, 2018).

Wei Chu earned his Ph.D. in Experimental Archaeology from the University of Reading, UK, in 2013 and his Habilitation in Prehistory from the University of Cologne, Germany, in 2021. He began at Leiden University as a researcher in 2021, progressing to his current position. Since 2024, he is Principal Investigator of the ERC Consolidator Grant-funded HOME project, which identifies and analyzes Late Pleistocene Palaeolithic shelters via systematic survey, excavation, and high-resolution stratigraphic and spatial approaches. Additional honors include SNMAP funding in 2022 for dating earliest dwelling structures in Ukraine and a Gerda Henkel grant in 2022 for Carpathian cave explorations.