Yichung Pan, a Taiwanese Archaeology PhD student at Aberdeen, has recently been awarded a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research based in New York.
Competition for these grants is fierce, since they are open to students worldwide who are studying Anthropology and Archaeology.
Yichung’s PhD research is exploring the earliest human colonisation of the Penghu islands, a tiny archipelago located in the Taiwan Straits between the coasts of southern China and Taiwan. Combining field-survey, targeted excavation and analyses of aretefacts and bioarchaeological remains, he hopes to resolve the colonisation history and ecological impact of the early Neolithic occupation of the islands some 6000 years ago. The award from the Wenner Gren will fund a major fieldwork and analytical campaign in 2015, during which time he will be a visiting Fellow based in the Academia Sinica in Taipei.