Karen Milek did a BA (Hons) in Anthropology and Near Eastern Archaeology at the University of Toronto, and her MPhil in World Archaeology (Europe in the First Millennium AD) at the University of Cambridge. She has been excavating and conducting geoarchaeological analyses on Viking and Medieval Period sites in Iceland, the Scottish Isles, and Norway since 1997. In 2006 she completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge on 'Houses and Households in Early Icelandic Society: Geoarchaeology and the Interpretation of Social Space'.  Karen worked part-time for the Institute of Archaeology, Iceland, from 2000-2007, first as an excavation supervisor at Sveigakot, and from 2005 as director of the excavations and field school at Vatnsfjörður. In 2007 she took the post of Lecturer in Archaeology at the University of Aberdeen, from where she continues to direct the field school at Vatnsfjörður, and to act as the collaborating geoarchaeologist on Viking Age and medieval excavation projects in Iceland (Hofstaðir, Sveigakot, Reykholt, Hrísbru) and Scotland (Bornais, Cille Pheadair, Quoygrew).

Research Interests

- Human impacts on past environments and sociocultural responses to environmental change
- The study of archaeological site formation processes using geoarchaeological methods
- Thin section analysis (micromorphology) of archaeological soils and sediments
- The social archaeology of houses
- Ethnoarchaeological and ethnohistorical studies of traditional houses in the North Atlantic region

For more information about Karen and her research, please visit her website.
(http://www.abdn.ac.uk/archaeology/staff.php?id="k.milek).