Marco Madella is an ICREA Research Professor. He graduated from the University of Milan in Botany and obtained a PhD in Archaeology at the University of Cambridge. He has been research fellow at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, affiliated lecturer in the Department of Archaeology and director of studies in archaeology and anthropology at St. Edmund's College in the University of Cambridge. He has also been visiting professor at the University of Sheffield and the Research Institute for Humanities and Nature (Kyoto, Japan). He is a member of the Centre for Archaeology, Heritage & Museum Studies at Shiv Nadar University (India) and Honorary Professor at the School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies of the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa). M Madella is Global Co-Coordinator of the LandCover6k working group of Past Global Changes (PAGES) and board member of the Commission for the Humans and the Biosphere of the INQUA (International Quaternary Union).

His background is in archaeobotany and environmental archaeology, and he is interested in understanding the socio-ecological dynamics of past human populations in extreme environments from the arid and semi-arid to very humid, from the Mediterranean to the tropics. His interests span from past vegetation histories, the modelling and simulation of processes in human behavioural change, people-plants co-evolutionary dynamics, long-term trajectories of biodiversity and sustainability in prehistoric societies, and the origin and resilience of agriculture. A key area of his work has been South Asia with a focus on the Indus Civilization and the South India Neolithic. A key research focus is land use during the past 10k years, the processes of biomes anthropization and their significance for current societies and climate change.

He is currently directing, among others, the project Modeling the Agricultural Origins and Urbanism in South Asia, which explores the dynamics of early agriculture and urban development in the greater Indus Valley of Pakistan and India.

Sample publications

2020 (in press), M Madella, C Lancelotti. Archaeobotanical Perspectives to Understand Water Supply and Water Management in the Indus Civilization, in S Rost (ed) Irrigation in Early States: New Directions, Chicago Oriental Institute.

2020. S Harrison, …(13 more authors)…, M Madella, K Morrison. Development and testing scenarios for implementing land use and land cover changes during the Holocene in Earth system model experiments. Geosci. Model Dev., 13, 805–824.

2019, AU Kay, Fuller DQ, Neumann K, Eichhorn B, Hohn A, Morin-Rivat J, Champion L, Linseele V, Huysecom E, Ozainne S, Lespez L, Biagetti S, Madella M, Salzmann U, Kaplan JO. Diversification, Intensification and Specialization: Changing Land Use in Western Africa from 1800 BC to AD 1500, Journal of World Prehistory 32(2):179-228

2019, V Ahedo, J Caro, E Bortolini, D Zurro, M Madella, JM Galan. Quantifying the relationship between food sharing practices and socio-ecological variables in small-scale societies: A cross-cultural multi-methodological approach, PLOS ONE 14(5): e0216302

UPF Scientific Output