Gill Plunkett is an archaeologist and palaeoecologist with a specific interest in understanding human-environment interactions in the past. As an archaeologist, Gill has worked on Irish prehistoric and Medieval sites, and has several years experience of wetland archaeology survey and recording. Her palaeoecological expertise includes palynology and plant macrofossil analysis (peatland and archaeobotanical), as well as the application of tephrochronology as both a dating and correlation method and a means of examining volcanic impacts on climate and society. While much of her research is based on Irish bogs, her tephra work extends to polar ice cores, the Caspian Sea and lakes and bogs in North America, Kamchatka and southeast Asia.

Current research projects

Co-Investigator on University of Southampton-led and AHRC-funded Waves of Colonisation in the Sea of Moyle project

Co-Investigator on the University of Lund-led and Swedish Research Council-funded VolcVarve project

Supervisor of Dr Chunqing Sun on the Newton-funded Late-Pleistocene to Holocene tephrostratigraphy over continental China project

ARP1006 Ancient Humans and Landscapes

ARP1007 Environmental Change: Past, Present and Future

ARP2041 Ireland in Prehistory

ARP2051 Palaeoenvironmental Techniques

ARP3086 Human-environment dynamics in the Holocene