Rate My Professor Mica Jones

Dr. Mica Jones is a zooarchaeologist and field archaeologist specializing in the interwoven histories of people and animals. She earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Southern Maine, where her interest in zooarchaeology developed, blending detective work, 3D puzzling, evolutionary theory, and cross-cultural thinking. Following her undergraduate studies, she worked several years in the food industry before pursuing a PhD at Washington University in St. Louis, completed in 2020. Her doctoral research involved analyzing over 130,000 animal bones from a 26,000-year-old rock shelter in Somalia and co-directing fieldwork along the shores of Lake Victoria in Uganda. She remained at Washington University as a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Zooarchaeology Lab after her PhD. In 2021, she joined the University of Oxford’s School of Archaeology as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the ERC-funded New Bantu Mosaics project, investigating the spread of early farming and the rise of large-scale food systems in southern Africa over the past two millennia. Her work focuses on reconstructing ancient herding and hunting lifeways through animal bone data, including taxonomic diversity, age profiles, butchery marks, stable isotope analysis, and genetics.

Jones's research interests encompass stratigraphy and chronology, stable isotope analysis, human-environment interactions, subsistence economies, and social variability, with geographic emphasis on southern Africa, East Africa, and eastern North America. Key publications include 'Kansyore fisher-hunter-gatherers abandoned the northeastern Lake Victoria shoreline during an arid period in the middle Holocene' (2022, Journal of African Archaeology), 'Hunter-gatherer reliance on inselbergs, big game, and dwarf antelope at the Rifle Range Site, southern Somalia ~20,000-5,000 BP' (2018, Quaternary International), 'Oxygen isotope analyses of ungulate tooth enamel confirm low seasonality of rainfall contributed to the African Humid Period in Somalia' (2019, Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology), and 'Improved ostrich eggshell and ungulate tooth enamel radiocarbon dating reveals Later Stone Age occupation in arid Late Pleistocene Somalia' (2021, Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports). Her contributions inform discussions on food security, migration, sustainable resource use, climate change, and biodiversity conservation through deep-time perspectives on human flexibility and innovation. She has taught courses on climate change and human evolution, emphasizing clear communication of scientific concepts.