Wei Chu is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Archaeology and PI of the HOME project.

More information about Wei Chu

Office days

Monday to Friday

Research

I am a geoarchaeologist specialising in the relationship between material culture, site formation processes, and past environments. My work focuses on lithic taphonomy, sedimentary context, and the environmental factors that shape archaeological assemblages. By integrating field observation, geoarchaeological sampling, experimental archaeology, and laboratory analysis, I investigate how artifacts and habitation features are altered, preserved, and ultimately recovered in the archaeological record. Since my habilitation, my recent regional focus has been on the Late Pleistocene of East-Central Europe, where I examine how humans organized spaces during periods of climatic and cultural transition. 

Since 2024, I have been Principal Investigator of the ERC Consolidator Grant project HOME, which aims to identify and analyze Late Pleistocene Palaeolithic shelters through systematic survey, excavation, and high-resolution stratigraphic and spatial approaches. The project develops comparative datasets for understanding habitation structures in open-air contexts. My long-term objective is to strengthen our analytical capacity in geoarchaeology and lithic taphonomy, advancing research on Palaeolithic landscapes and contributing to interdisciplinary work on human behavior in changing environments.

Curriculum vitae

Education
2021 Habilitation, Prehistory; University of Cologne, DE
2013 Ph.D., Experimental Archaeology; University of Reading, UK

Previous professional appointments

2021-2023 Researcher, Leiden University, NL

Publications

Activities