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“I really like listening to podcasts when I’m walking or working out, so I always thought it would be nice to do one on archaeological topics that I’d like to learn about,” says Noah. “You meet so many people that have cool projects, or you find articles that sound really interesting, but they’re not in your wheelhouse.” 

So Noah started his own podcast, ‘Archaeological Context’, in 2021, hosting an expert guest each episode to give overviews of archaeological topics based on published research. The Covid-19 lockdowns offered an opportunity to try out the format, which Noah says he will revive when he has more time. 

Noah’s main research focus is on funerary archaeology – graves, burials, and tombs. “I’m from Switzerland, from a small village in the Alps. I’ve always been fascinated by mountains, and doing hiking and skiing and so on. To have Neolithic burials in these landscapes and to think that people lived there many millennia ago was always really interesting to me.” This interest was reinforced by family holidays when he was a child. “We never went just to lie on beaches,” Noah laughs. “We always visited historic sites – castles, battlefields, and especially Neolithic stone structures. That has to be why I got into it, and why I’m so interested in what I do now.” Noah joined ����Vlog�ٷ� as a Junior Research Fellow at the end of June, and he’s looking forward to the beginning of term when there are more people on site.

“I like that it’s super open here. So at lunch, I like to sit down and talk with different people. Yesterday I met a Fellow, and it was really interesting to just speak about our different research interests. I’m looking forward to experiencing more.”

For his PhD, Noah analysed some of the oldest Neolithic graves in the Alps of Switzerland, France, and Italy. “These are mostly box-shaped graves made of stone, or sometimes wood. You have individuals buried in there – many individuals sometimes. I’ve seen some that have comingled remains of sixteen different individuals just cramped in that space,” he says, while gesturing with his hands. “They are super interesting. That’s why I did my PhD on them. I’m working on a follow-up project in Bern at the moment, doing a DNA and isotope analysis to determine things like diet and migration patterns. It was my dream to be involved in a DNA project covering these individuals.” Noah says that a DNA project like this one enables archaeologists to identify interconnections and family relationships within the graves. They also hope to detect inter-regional kinship ties spanning different Alpine villages.

While he is in Cambridge, Noah is working at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research on a project to apply Virtual Reality models to megalithic chamber tombs. These stone tombs required a huge effort by the community to construct, and were made up of passages, sometimes as long as 30 metres, leading up to burial chambers that were covered by a cairn.

Noah says, “I thought all this effort must have been put in to evoke specific emotions in the person visiting the site. Like if you go to a church, it was constructed to inspire things like awe or contemplation. Light is an important factor with the church windows and tranquillity, and then the sound – echoes, whispers, all of that. I think that sensory aspects like this were also thought about in the Stone Age.”

To understand this further, Noah is employing VR technology, because how we see these monuments now is not how they were constructed or envisioned originally. There is often electric lighting for safety, and there are sometimes reconstructions that change the appearance of the site. Noah explains, “With the VR model, you can then mask certain things, or overlay digital elements. One big thing is light and dark. These tombs were always in the darkness, and you could only illuminate things artificially with firelight. With VR, you can go walk through these corridors with a torch, digitally, to see how the light plays, especially on rock art. You have symbols like this, the triskele.” Noah points out a tattoo of a triple spiral on his arm. “These are now in research papers, and you always see them perfectly 3D scanned, or illuminated really nicely. But they were likely often not experienced like this. They were seen by firelight, with the light flickering, and that also can make it appear like they’re moving.” 

Another benefit of Noah’s project is enhancing the accessibility of these monuments for a wider audience. He says, “Sometimes the sites are really remote, or you’re not allowed to enter them. What I would like to do is to make these models, and then have multiple people experience them through VR. I think if I experience them, I already know, ‘Okay, here will be a carving, here will be the bones.’ I want people to do a questionnaire to find out what their emotions were. So maybe once I have some models, I will try to get some people at ����Vlog�ٷ� involved!”

When asked about some misconceptions in his field, Noah smiles. “I mean, it’s always dinosaurs. Always with the dinosaurs. Or then, of course, it’s, ‘Have you found gold?’ What annoys me the most is Ancient Apocalypse, this Netflix series with Graham Hancock. Everybody saw it. They invested so much money to make this pseudo-archaeological series.” The series, and others like it, have drawn widespread criticism from professionals in the field. “There's so much misinformation, I think, going on. There’s also Erich von Däniken, the Swiss guy who talks about ancient aliens. As a Swiss person myself, I’m familiar with all these things. I taught a course a year ago at the university in Switzerland about fake news in archaeology and how to counter it, and that was really engaging for the students to debate.”

Although he also enjoys planning and research in the library, one of Noah’s favourite things about archaeology is being in the field. “There’s an adventurous side to it. The moment when you find something: that’s always exciting. Last August, in Alaska, we did a really small dig, and we found 10,000-year-old flint tools. You think, 10,000 years ago, someone had this in their hand and was hunting with this projectile. And now I’ve found it, I’m the next human to hold it in my hand.”