I am an archaeozoologist, specialist of the South West Asian mammalian and bird remains. During the past 26 years I worked in Iran, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Irak, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Georgia. Through a diachronic approach to the subsistence economies, I am interested in a better characterisation of the sedentary and non-sedentary societies in the past that interacted within these vast territories of South West Asia, with a particular focus on the Neolithic process. In parallel to the classical archaeozoological analyses, I lead several programs on the study of mobile pastoralism using biogeochemestry and isotopic analyses as well as morphometric analyses combined with genetics.
Currently, and with Dr. Morteza Djamali (IMBE- CNRS), I am leading a bilateral research project between France and Iran (LIA-HAOMA) on human and environment interactions on the Iranian Plateau from Late glacial and late Holocene.
In Iran, together with Dr. Haeedeh Laleh, we created of the Bioarchaeology Laboratory of the University of Tehran with a dynamic Archaeozoology section and the scientific supervisor of the department of osteology at the National Museum of Iran. From the last 15 years I have trained several students from Iran, France and Germany on the bioarchaoelogy of the Iranian Plateau and Central Asia.
I am currently the co-director of Archaeozoology and Archaeobotany Research Group of the CNRS (UMR 7209) at the Natural History Museum of Paris. I have been the Liaison for the ASWA Working Group / ICAZ from 2010 to 2019.
Publication can be accessed through HAL, Academia , Google Scholars and Research Gate