About Our Research

Learn more about what we do and how we do it.

Background

Our research programme is made up of a loosely configured set of individual projects. Each project draws on archaeological data and contemporary fisheries and marine science data. Trace element and Isotope analysis of archaeological and present-day calcified structures (e.g., otoliths, bones, shells) are being used to unlock fine-scale spatial and temporal information about the habitat interactions of organisms, past and present. We will then use these information for the purpose of comparative paleoenvironmental reconstruction and also potentially coastal landuse changes and anthropogenic impacts.

Methodology

As elemental data obtained from Laser Ablation Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (LA‐ICP‐MS) transects directly resemble time series data, we will apply a highly innovative “time series clustering” approach to partition time series data into groups based on similarity or distance, so that time series in the same cluster are similar. We have so far successfully employed Behaviour Change Point Analysis (BCPA) (Sabetian et al., 2021) and aim to expand this approach by using Dynamic Time Warping (DTW). BCPA is a methodology that can be employed to identify hidden shifts of the underlying parameters in the autocorrelation structure of a time-series, an approach which is rooted in the field of movement ecology, while DTW is a time series analysis approach that is capable of efficiently comparing sequential data despite temporal offsets that confound other methods. DTW method is both efficient and remarkably flexible, capable of efficiently matching sequentially structured data sets such as otolith micro-chemical information.

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