Dr Elinor Graham

Biography

Ellie is a field archaeologist with a background in commercial archaeology, coastal landscapes, remote sensing and GIS, as well as community engagement. She currently works as a Research Fellow on the CITADEL Project, focused on excavation and post-excavation analysis for the internationally important early medieval promontory fort of Burghead on the Moray Firth. 

After graduating in 2005, Ellie became a commercial archaeologist in south Wales, working on a range of field and consultancy projects, research-driven thematic landscape surveys and community archaeology. From 2009 she led the community and coastal heritage Arfordir Project in SW Wales, surveying and excavating eroding coastal sites and training local community members to record threatened heritage. While working full time in this role, she completed her Masters degree in Professional Archaeology from the University of Birmingham. From 2012 to 2020 she continued this work in Scotland with the SCAPE Trust based at the University of St Andrews, as part of the award-winning Scotland's Coastal Heritage at Risk Project, recruiting and training volunteers as citizen archaeologists and undertaking practical community-led projects at sites around the Scottish coast in response to the erosion threat.

In October 2020, Ellie began her QUADRAT-funded PhD at the University of Aberdeen where her project focused on carrying out drone-based surveys of eroding archaeological sites around the coast of Scotland to assess climate-driven erosion threat in a range of coastal environments and devise a prioritisation methodology. She also led several excavations on eroding coastal sites, while the survey methodology she developed is being used by community groups to monitor their local coastal heritage and report episodes of loss or damage. 

In 2024 Ellie began her role with the CITADEL Project and also teaches on several archaeology undergraduate modules. 

External Memberships

ACIfA (Associate of the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists)