About Bettina Schulz Paulsson

Bettina Schulz Paulsson, PhD, researcher, principal investigator ERC-starting grant project NEOSEA

Bettina Schulz Paulsson is a Swiss associate professor of archaeology with a research focus on the Stone Ages. She is particularly interested in scientific dating and methods, megaliths, Stone Age seafaring, Neolithic and rock art studies, science theory and South American anthropology.

Trained in Berlin, Germany, she attended the Human Development in Landscapes Graduate School at the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Science, Christian Albrechts-Universität in Kiel, where she obtained the PhD degree in Prehistoric archaeology in May 2015. In 2016, following parental leave, she won a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research Fellowship at the Department of Historical Studies, University of Gothenburg with a project on European megalithic art.

Her research results, published in 2019 in the American journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), marked a breakthrough in European megalithic studies and received widespread media coverage, including feature articles in The New York Times and the Smithsonian Magazine

Since 2019, Schulz Paulsson has been employed as a researcher and lecturer at the Department of Historical Studies. In 2022, she was promoted to Associate Professor, and in 2023, she assumed the position of Senior Lecturer within the department.

As a Bayesian Modeling & Data Analysis Statistical consultant Schulz Paulsson is involved in several national and international projects within contract archaeology and international research projects.

In 2020, she was awarded a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant for the project NEOSEA (start in November 2020), which investigates early maritime technologies, the development of seafaring among Mesolithic hunter-gatherers in Brittany, and transcultural maritime interactions along the Atlantic façade of megalithic

To achieve these goals, Schulz Paulsson applies a wide range of scientific methods and is compiling available human bone samples and she is compiling available human bone samples from early megalithic contexts across Europe for radiocarbon dates, using: (1) ancient DNA (aDNA) and strontium/oxygen isotope analyses and (2) the novel extraction of environmental DNA (eDNA) from sediments at the earliest megalithic sites in Northwest France lacking bone preservation.The application of Bayesian statistical modelling on eDNA, aDNA and strontium/oxygen analysis coupled with a large database of radiocarbon dates is producing the first closely detailed sequence for the rise of seafaring megalithic societies and their spread across Europe.The project currently comprises ten subprojects. Schulz Paulsson, who speaks several European languages (French, German, Swedish, and English), coordinates international research teams and fieldwork in France, Italy, Portugal, and Sweden.Since 2021, she has also been responsible for leading the Bayesian Modelling Group within the ERC Synergy Grant project COREX.

Le Plasker in Plouharnel (fifth millennium cal BC): a newly discovered section of the megalithic complex of Carnac. Bettina Schulz Paulsson The Early Neolithic of Northern Europe. new approaches to migration, movement and social connection / Daniela Hofmann, Vicki Cummings, Mathias Bjørnevad-Ahlqvist & Rune Iversen (eds.) Transmission symbolique et rencontres transculturelles maritimes dans l´Europe mégalithique (4700-2500 cal Bettina Schulz Paulsson Les Gravures Rupuestres Protohistoriques en Eurasie. Actes du Colloques International du mardi 7 au 9 décembre 2021 á L´Institut de Paléóntologie Humaine, Paris. Sous le haut patronage de S.A.S Le Prince Souverain Albert II de Monaco The BIAD Standards: Recommendations for Archaeological Data Publication and Insights From the Big Interdisciplinary Archaeological Database Couleur du temps : altérations chromatique et pseudo-peintures néolithiques observées sur les parois des tombes monumentales du Morbihain The local appropriation of warrior ideals in Late Bronze Age Europe: a review of the rock art site of Arroyo Tamujoso 8 and the ‘warrior’ stela of Cancho Roano (Badajoz, Spain) Neolithic Seafaring and Maritime Technologies Shaped a New World of Megalithic Societies (4500-2500 CAL BC): The NEOSEA Project Radiocarbon dates and Bayesian modeling support maritime diffusion model for megaliths in Europe Bettina Schulz Paulsson Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America Mònica Oliva Poveda Guirec Querré, Serge Cassen and Emmanuelle Vigier (eds.), La parure en callaïs du Néolithique européen A Highly Precise Chronology for the Process of Neolithization in Southern Scandinavia: The ESS Project in Lund, Sweden