Elizabeth Velliky
Department of Archaeology, History, Culture Studies and Religion, Faculty of Humanities
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Dr Elizabeth (Beth) Velliky is a Postdoctoral Fellow in archaeology at the University of Bergen SFF Centre for Early Sapiens Behaviour (SapienCE) in Bergen, Norway. She holds a dual doctorate in Archaeology from the University of Western Australia in Perth, Australia and the University of Tübingen in Tübingen, Germany. Her research focus is to combine methods and perspectives from archaeology, anthropology, geology, chemistry, contemporary art and ethnography to study the relationship between mineral pigment use and early human cultural evolution, expression and symbolism. She has applied her research perspectives to sites in Canada, Germany, eSwatini, and South Africa, where her current work focuses on the mineral pigment assemblages from Blombos and Klipdrift caves and how these behaviours impacted and shaped the culture and society of the earliest humans in Africa, and how these evolved over time. Aside from mineral pigments, she also engages in rock art, personal ornaments, raw material acquisition and transportation, and symbolic behaviours more generally. She has worked on sites in the USA, Canada, Germany, Israel, Oman, eSwatini, South Africa, and Norway.
