Ana Pena Pérez

Investigadora predoctoral FPU

ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-2428-5912
Email: anapena@ub.edu

Short biography

I have a bachelor’s degree in Archeology from the University of Barcelona (2018). I took the inter-university master’s degree in Quaternary Archeology and Human Evolution – Erasmus Mundus (2020) at University Rovira i Virgili, with the support of a URV Master Scholarship, and at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, with the support of the Erasmus + Studies Program. I am currently a PhD candidate with a FPU contract funded by the Ministry of Universities. I am part of the “PaleoBarcino” project’s research team (PID2020-117186GB-I00, PI Santiago Riera Mora) and I am a member of the Prehistoric Studies and Research Seminar (SERP).

Research interests

My specialization in Archaeobotany began during my undergrad studies, with the completion of the Bioarchaeology of Barcelona Internship and the initiation to research through an Archaeobotany Collaboration Scholarship within the framework of the PaleoBarcino Project. Later, my bachelor’s and master’s theses focused on Holocene fire history reconstructions in the Barcelona area. Currently, my doctoral research focuses on the paleoenvironmental reconstruction of the Barcelona Plain with the aim to understand the socio-environmental relationships between human communities and their environment, from the Epipaleolithic to the Roman era. To do this, I conduct multiproxy studies of sedimentary records from the plain by combining three paleoecological proxies: fossil pollen, non-pollen palynomorphs, and sedimentary charcoal. I am interested in paleo-landscape transformations of Mediterranean coastal regions produced by human impact, in general, and by prehistoric communities, in particular.