Brandon Zinsious

Portuguese Studies Program Graduate Research Assistant, MA student

About

 

I work with Dr. Jonathan Haws on Middle and Upper Paleolithic Sites in Portugal, as well as surveying for potential Middle and Late Stone Age sites in Mozambique.

My academic interests include Paleolithic and Stone Age archaeology in the Old World, spatial patterning and sampling theory in archaeology, Geoarchaeology, and Marxian Archaeology. My research is heavily influenced by spatial technologies, especially Unmanned Aerial Systems, Remote Sensing, LiDAR, Photogrammetry, and tracking the spatial distribution of artifacts using GIS. I subscribe to a multidisciplinary approach to answering archaeological questions, which can be seen in how I frame my research questions and approach field work.

 

I have been traveling to Portugal every year since the 2012 summer field season with Dr. Haws. Since then, I have worked on multiple Middle and Upper Paleolithic sites on both the coast and the interior of Portugal. In 2014, I joined Dr. Haws on an exploratory survey of Ncuala Valley in Northern Mozambique. We were part of a team comprised of archaeologists from Portugal and Mozambique, as well as a geomorphologist from UNC. Starting in 2014, Dr. Haws and I have been experimenting with Unmanned Aerial Systems in archaeological survey. In April of 2015, I presented a poster on this research at the 80th annual Society for American Archaeology conference in San Francisco. In the summer of 2015 I returned to Mozambique to continue survey, this time in Massingir, near the Limpopo Nation Park. Dr. Haws and I used Unmanned Aerial Systems and photogrammetry techniques to create 3 dimensional models and Digital Elevation Models of part of the survey area. In April of 2016 I presented a poster on the results of photogrammetric work done at Lapa de Picareiro, which followed our work done in Mozambique in 2015.

In June of 2016, I returned to Mozambique for a third season of survey, producing maps and models using UAS technology. I presented a poster on this work at the conference for the Society of African Archaeologists (SAFA) in Toulouse, France. In July, I spent my second year as the TA for the Field School at Lapa de Picareiro, my fifth year on the site. With the integration of LiDAR, photogrammetry, and total station data, I was able to create high resolution imagery of the cave. Data analysis is still underway. I hope to present a paper on some of this fine resolution spatial data, and how it may shed some light on the chronology of the Solutrean in Iberia, at the Spring 2017 SAAs in Vancouver.

My thesis uses the spatial data collected at Lapa de Picareiro on the geological layer “F”, and will include an analysis of the distribution of material remains in that layer and what it may tell us about past human behavior.

In 2016, I was also invited to join the research organization ICArEHB. This is the Interdisciplinary Center for Archaeology and Evolution of Human Behaviour at the Universidade do Algarve, Portugal.

 

Outside of the University of Louisville, I work at a Cultural Resource Management company named Corn Island doing local archaeology. I have been excavating, surveying and doing lab work with them since January of 2014.

To get more experience with satellite based surveying, I worked for a Survey Engineer in 2014 as well, training with Trimble equipment. I have also had the fortune to go caving with the Kentucky Karst Conservancy group and Qk4, as they use Faro equipment to LiDAR scan the interior of Big Bat Cave here in Kentucky. Over the past two and a half years I have been able to get hands on experience with the scanning process and equipment. The extremely narrow and cramped passageways at Big Bat Cave forced interesting problem solving and collection methods for continuous and accurate LiDAR data.

 

I served two years as President of the Anthropology Graduate Student Association, and a single year as the Treasurer. If you have any questions about our mission statement or joining, please email me!

 

While in the department I have taken some amazing classes and worked with wonderful professors. Some of my favorite classes have been Political Ecology, Race Perspectives, Social and Cultural Theory, and Archaeological Research Methods. I also learned a great deal from a semester spent in the archaeology lab piecing together a set of human remains under the guidance of Phil DiBlasi.

 

Fun Facts!

  • I love rock climbing and caving. I feel very much at home at heights and in deep underground crawl spaces.
  • Snowboarding is my winter sport of choice. Sand volleyball is my summer sport of choice.
  • I am a strategy board game addict!