Dr. Henny Piezonka

Henny Piezonka (PhD, Free University Berlin, 2010) has been a Junior Professor for Anthropological Archaeology at Kiel University, Germany, since 2016. In May 2023, she was appointed University Professor for Prehistoric Archaeology at the Free University Berlin, Germany.

Her research and teaching focuses on the archaeology and anthropology of mobile hunter-gatherer and herder societies in North Eurasia and beyond. It covers three main, interconnected areas: hunter-gatherer diversity, technological innovations such as pottery as a source for socio-economic reconstruction, and Neolithisation pathways. While much of her work deals with the Stone Age, she also conducts ethnoarchaeological work in collaboration with indigenous hunter-fisher-reindeer herder groups in Western Siberia.

As one of the PIs of the Kiel Cluster of Excellence “ROOTS – Social, Environmental, and Cultural Connectivity in Past Societies” she has been studying the dynamics of social inequalities and the entanglement of domestication, diet and diseases. In the Collaborative Research Centre “Scales of Transformation: Human-environmental Interaction in Prehistoric and Archaic Societies” she works on theoretical approaches to transformation. In a project funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation, Piezonka and her team investigate roles and perception of abandoned urban sites within the Mongolian nomadic society at the interface between archaeology and cultural anthropology.

• Piezonka, H., Chairkina, N., Dubovtseva, E., Kosinskaya, L., Meadows, J., Schreiber, T. (forthcoming), The world’s oldest known promontory fort – Amnya and the acceleration of hunter-gatherer diversity in Siberia 8000 years ago. Antiquity.
• Piezonka, H., 2021. North of the Farmers. Mobility and sedentism among Stone Age hunter-gatherers from the Baltic to the Barents Sea. In: Orschiedt, J., Liebermann, C., Stäuble, H., Schier, W. (eds), Mesolithic or Neolithic? – Searching for the late hunter-gatherers. Topoi. Berlin Studies of the Ancient World, 72, 245–302.
• Piezonka, H., Poshekhonova, O., Adaev, V., Rud’, A., 2020. A. Migration and its effects on life ways and subsistence strategies of boreal hunter-fishers: Ethnoarchaeological research among the Selkup, Siberia. Quaternary International, 541, 189–203.
• Piezonka, H., Kosinskaya, L., Dubovtseva, E., Chemyakin, Yu., Enshin, D., Hartz, S., Kovaleva, V., Panina, S., Savchenko, S., Skochina, S., Terberger, T., Zakh, V., Zhilin, M., Zykov, A.P., 2020. The emergence of early pottery in the Urals and Western Siberia – New dating and stable isotope evidence. Journal of Archaeological Science, 116, 105100. DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2020.105100
• Piezonka, H., 2015. Jäger, Fischer, Töpfer. Wildbeuter mit früher Keramik in Nordosteuropa im 6. und 5. Jahrtausend v. Chr.. Archäologie in Eurasien 30. Bonn: Habelt.