RLEA news will be posted here. You can also check our Publications page.
2025
Award Announcement: Ramsey Laboratory for Environmental Archaeology Secures Major Funding
We are excited to announce that the Ramsey Laboratory for Environmental Archaeology (RLEA) at the University of Toronto has been awarded significant funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Insight Development Grant (SSHRC-IDG). This grant will propel the lab’s cutting-edge research on a novel proxy for understanding cooking, brewing, and baking by pre-historic peoples.
Recent Presentations at the 90th annual Society for American Archaeology in Denver, Colorado
PhD students Lachlan Kyle-Robinson and Melanie Pugliese recently presented presentations at the 90th annual SAA conference on the recent projects conducted in the lab. Outlining the automation work flow designed to capture high quality reference material with minimal human action and the incorporation of this process for the development of an AI algorithm trained to distinguish between wild and domestic version of wheat husk phytoliths, both presentations garnered a great deal of excitement for the ground breaking work being conducted at the RLEA. PDF versions of these presentations can be found on the labs twitter page
2024
Melanie Pugliese was awarded a SSHRC Doctoral Award for New Paleoethnobotanical Methodology: Using Artificial Intelligence to Illuminate Plant Use in the Past. (Posted May, 2024)
The RLEA presented their current Lab Updates IN PROCESS: The Development of an Automatic Deep-Learning Phytolith Analysis Workflow at the SAA's in New Orleans. (Posted April 20 2024)
Lachlan Kyle-Robinson was awarded a CGS M Award for Resiliency: Pre-Pottery Neolithic Plant Use and Resource Selection During Regional Decline. (Posted April, 2024)
Lachlan Kyle-Robinson was awarded a research fellowship grant through the University of Toronto Archaeology Center to support upcoming work with Dr. Donald Butler. This research focuses on developing understandings of how growth/collapse cycles in transnational exchange networks shaped emergent rural economies along the Incense Road in the Negev Desert, Israel between the 3rd century BCE and 8th century CE. The Incense Road connecting Arabia and the Mediterranean was established as the main artery for delivering goods such as frankincense, perfumes, oils, and fish from production centers in Arabia to the Mediterranean. (Posted March 20, 2024)
2023
Dr. Monica Ramsey has published a new academic paper that sheds light on the fascinating evolution of human food production in the southern Levant. Using a multi-proxy archaeobotanical dataset and niche construction theory, the study explores the impact of human impacts on wetland ecosystems and the transition to plant food production. Shareit link: https://rdcu.be/c8lAm. (Posted March 24, 2023)
Dr. Monica Ramsey was awarded $9,270.00 in credit with the AWS (Amazon Web Services) Cloud Credit for Research program to help cover costs associated with the implementation of the RLEA database currently in development with the DSI. (Posted February 8, 2023)
Dr. Monica Ramsey was recently selected as a recipient of the U of T Data Sciences Institute Research Software Development Support Program. This program will enable Dr. Ramsey to work with a professional software developer in order to build a customized lab database in support of her archaeological research program at UTM. (Posted February 8, 2023)