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King’s People

Biography

Dr Jenni Sherriff is a physical geographer interested in understanding Quaternary landscape evolution, climate change, and hominin dispersals in Eurasia. Prior to becoming a Lecturer in Physical Geography at King’s in September 2021, Jenni completed her PhD research in 2015 at Royal Holloway, University on London, investigating environmental change and Palaeolithic dispersals in Britain. This was followed by postdoctoral fellowship positions on the Leverhulme Trust funded project ‘Pleistocene Archaeology, Geochronology and Environments of the southern Caucasus’ (2016-2019) and the Historic England funded project ‘Predicting Palaeolithic Archaeology in England – a Geological Mapping Approach’ (2019), both at the University of Winchester. More recently, Jenni has been employed as a lecturer in Physical Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London (2019-2021).

Research

  • Pleistocene landscape evolution in the southern Caucasus
  • Hominin evolution and dispersals into and throughout Eurasia
  • Geoarchaeology of cave and open-air Palaeolithic sites
  • Interglacial climate change
  • Freshwater and soil carbonates as palaeoclimate archives

Jenni seeks to understand past environmental change in both Britain and the southern Caucasus through the combined use of field and desktop-based geomorphic and geologic mapping, sedimentology, micromorphology and sediment geochemistry. She is particularly interested in understanding how climate and landscape evolution during the Pleistocene may have influenced hominin evolution and dispersals, particularly how the Palaeolithic archaeological record can be robustly linked with sedimentary and geomorphic archives of environmental change. She is also interested in the terrestrial expression of Middle Pleistocene interglacials and the utilisation of sediment and stable isotope geochemistry to reconstruct climate change during these warm periods. Jenni is part of several ongoing research projects based both in the UK and overseas, including ‘Pleistocene Settlement of the Armenian Highlands’ (funded by the Leakey Foundation and Royal Geographical Society), ‘Pleistocene Hunter-Gatherer Lifeways and Population Dynamics in the Ararat Depression, Armenia’ (funded by the Fritz-Thyssen Foundation) and ‘ TransCause - Investigating Pleistocene population dynamics in the Southern Caucasus’ (funded by the European Research Council).

Further details

See Jenni's research profile