Veronika KAUDELA
Career
Veronika Kaudela studied Prehistory and Historical Archaeology from 2015 to 2023, graduated with honours, and obtained her Master´s degree (Master of Arts) at the University of Vienna (AUT). The topic of the master’s thesis was the examination of the adornments of the Gravettian site of Krems-Wachtberg in a chronological and techno-cultural context, including their life-cycle and use-wear analysis. During her studies, she worked at different archaeological sites in Austria, Italy and Romania as an excavation collaborator, tutor for other students, and archaeological specialist. She mainly participated at the excavations at the Epigravettian/Gravettian sites of Kammern-Grubgraben in Austria and Bistricioara-Lutărie III/Bistricioara-La Mal in Romania, in cooperation with the Austrian Archaeological Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (for further details, see: https://www.oeaw.ac.at/oeai/forschung/praehistorie-wana-archaeologie/quartaerarchaeologie/kammern-grubgraben, and https://www.oeaw.ac.at/oeai/forschung/praehistorie-wana-archaeologie/quartaerarchaeologie/comparing-upper-palaeolithic-sequences-across-the-carpathians). Since completing her studies, she has been working on a project, which aims to scan the bones of twin infants of a Gravettian burial from the site Krems-Wachtberg with μCT scanner (project: https://kris.kl.ac.at/de/projects/digitising-and-reconstructing-an-upper-palaeolithic-infant-twin-b)
PhD Project
During her involvement at several Romanian Palaeolithic sites, the idea of her current PhD project was developed. The aim of the project is to examine the lithic collections of the Bistricioara-Lutărie III and Bistricioara-La Mal (Romania) sites with a traceological perspective.
The collections of both sites offer over 30 000 lithic artefacts including burins, endscrapers, points, backed blades and bladelets; as well as unretouched blades, bladelets, flakes and cores. At Bistricioara Lutărie III, at least 6 archaeological horizons have been identified, with numerical ages ranging between 27 700 and 18 300 calBP, including Gravettian, Epigravettian and likely Final Palaeolithic contexts. The sedimentary sequence at Bistricioara-La Mal, which is located next to the previous site on a lower terrace, hosts two multilayered Epigravettian occupation episodes dated between 17 500 and 16 400 calBP. Thorough investigation of these sites in the past years provide an excellent stratigraphical and therefore chronological control, as well as information on the function of each occupation.
After following a training in functional studies at TraceoLab, Veronika Kaudela will undertake the analysis of the lithic material from both sites in order to deepen the understanding of the function of each lithic tool category and to seize the diachronic functional changes hidden between perceptible taxonomic shifts. This project will be developed as part of a joint PhD programme between the University of Cologne (lead) and the University of Liège under the supervision of Jun.-Prof. Dr. Andreas Maier (Cologne) and Dr. Veerle Rots (Liège), and will be among the first of its kind in the context of Romanian Palaeolithic research.
