Dave Smith
- Postgraduate research student.
Areas of interest
- Early British prehistory
- The prehistory of the Levant
- Early Maltese prehistory
- Geospatial, digital and computer applications in archaeology
- Patterns of evolution in technology, communication and trade.
Research centres and groups
Research projects
Spatial organisation of early Neolithic communities in the Southern Levant: A spatial analysis of the WF16 Wadi Faynan settlement with regional comparisons
WF16 (Wadi Faynan) is an important pre-pottery Neolithic settlement site located in Southern Jordan and has been the subject of extensive research and excavation by Reading University’s Department of Archaeology for over 20 years.
My PhD research project aims to create an in-depth spatial analysis and layout reconstruction of the WF16 site and its immediate environs, based on the existing recorded assemblages and artefacts from the excavations. The research will help to build further knowledge about the activities that the people of WF16 were undertaking during this period, how they were organising themselves spatially to conduct those activities, and how those activities and the WF16 site relates to other contemporaneous settlements in the Southern Levant.
Supervisor
Background
I hold a BEng (Hons) Enh. in Electrical & Electronic Engineering from Bradford University, an MA (Hons) in Archaeology from Reading University, and I am also a Chartered Engineer (CEng) and Fellow of the IET (Institution of Engineering and Technology).
My personal interest in archaeology and anthropology has always been an important diversion from my day-to-day industry career in business strategy, management, technology marketing and technology commercialisation, which has afforded me the opportunity to work in senior leadership positions all over the world for some of the leading global technology companies, start-ups and marketing brands of the last 30 years. I now run my own company providing strategy and marketing consultancy services to a portfolio of global clients.
My MA Archaeology thesis focused on spatial patterning analysis and settlement layout reconstruction of a Scottish Mesolithic site on Islay, and I now have the opportunity to research geospatial patterning in more depth 20+ years later as a PhD project, this time centred on the organisation of early Neolithic communities in the southern Levant. My other archaeological interests are in Dark Age Britain and earlier British and Maltese prehistory, particularly around topics combining archaeology with technology skills I have developed throughout my professional experience, such as in the fields of geospatial, computational and digital archaeology.