Dr. Laurent Davin received his PhD in Archaeology, Ethnology and Prehistory from Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne University under the supervision of Prof. Boris Valentin. Previously, he received his BA in History of Art and Archaeology and his MA in Prehistoric Archaeology from Aix-Marseille University. During his doctoral research, Dr. Davin worked on the personal ornaments (shell, bone, tooth beads) discovered in the funerary context of the first settled hunter-gatherers in the Levant (Early Natufian of Eynan-Mallaha). Dr. Davin’s first postdoctoral position was with the Fyssen Foundation at the CNRS UMR TEMPS in Nanterre where he worked on the prehistoric ornaments and sound instruments of the Natufians, the earliest sedentary communities in the world. 

 

Dr. Davin is conducting his research at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, under the supervision of Prof. Leore Grosman, in the framework of the Computational Archaeology Laboratory. The aim of his postdoctoral research is to assess the growing social complexity that accompanied the transformation from Palaeolithic to Neolithic lifestyles in the Southern Levant through the study of Natufian personal ornaments and sound instruments. To answer this question and highlight the Natufian ornamental territories, he will analyze the collections of four Natufian sites from northern Israel by developing innovative research methods based on 3-D scanning technology.