Draft:Elizabeth Healey (archaeologist)

Dr Elizabeth Healey is a British archaeologist, and world expert in obsidian and lithics.

Elizabeth Healey PhD
Occupation	British Archaeologist
Academic work
Discipline	Archaeologist
Sub-discipline	Socio-economic contexts of stone tools
Institutions	Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Manchester

Career

Dr Elizabeth Healey is an Honorary Research Fellow (Archaeology) at the University of Manchester, UK. Throughout her archaeological career, Elizabeth Healey has been involved, one way or another, with the study of stone tools. She has studied lithic assemblages of Neolithic and later date from various excavations in the UK and Near East. Currently, much of her research involves the provenancing of obsidian (through the Manchester Obsidian Laboratory) from a number of sites in the Near East.

As a member of the Lithics Studies Society, Healey participated in many notable conferences including the crucial 1979 conference in Cheltenham which addressed the absence of a recognized descriptive terminology for postglacial lithic artefacts in the UK.

In 2014, the Manchester Obsidian Laboratory was founded as a collaboration between Stuart Campbell (University of Manchester), Elizabeth Healey (University of Manchester) and Osamu Maeda (University of Tsukuba). Their main research focus is on obsidian in the Middle East, at all periods of history and prehistory, but have also worked on obsidian from other parts of the world, most recently including John Dee’s obsidian mirror. To date, they have analysed more than 6,500 archaeological artefacts and more than 1,500 geological samples. In her interpretation of that data, Elizabeth focuses on the socio-economic and symbolic aspects of the origins, acquisition and use of obsidian and how the exploitation of obsidian compares or contrasts to the exploitation of flint/chert.

Specific projects include:

- The occurrence, manufacture and use of non-utilitarian objects made by grinding and polishing obsidian in the Near East.

- The origins and use of the obsidians at Tell Arpachiyah, Iraq. This is a colobarative project with Professor Stuart Campbell and others investing not only the origins of the obsidians used at Arpachiyah for the ground and polished objects recovered by Max Mallowan in the 1930s, but also the techniques used their manufacture.

- The origins, technology and use of the lithic artefacts from Domuztepe, Tell Kurdu, Tell Atachana and Kenan Tepe in SE Turkey and Tell Zeidan in N.E.Syria – all on going lithic reports.

- The wider implications of how we approach and interpret the occurrence of obsidian at prehistoric sites in the Near East.

Publications

Sole author

1. Raw Material Matters (2022)
2. Not only a tool-stone: Other ways of using obsidian in the Near East (2021)

Co–author

1. Rock Crystal Reduction at the Early Neolithic site of Dorstone Hill, Herefordshire, and its wider British and European con by Elizabeth Healey and Nick J. Overton (https://doi.org/10.2218/jls.7306)
2. Dorstone Hill: a Neolithic timescape (2023) by Ray, Keith & Thomas, Julian & Overton, Nick & Griffiths, Seren & Hoverd, Tim & Allen, Michael & Barclay, Alistair & Birchenall, Julie & Challinor, Dana & French, Charley & Healey, Elizabeth & Ixer, Robert & Roseveare, Anne & Roseveare, Martin & Rovira, Irene & Stanford, Adam & Wiltshire, Isabel. (https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2023.93_
3. Lithics in Household: Obsidian Use at Kenan Tepe (2023) by Stuart Campbell, Elizabeth Healey (https://doi.org/10.59641/d38e92c5)
4. Not All That Glitters is Gold? Rock Crystal in the Early British Neolithic at Dorstone Hill, Herefordshire, and the Wider British and Irish Context (2022) by Nicholas Overton, Elizabeth Healey, Irene Garcia Rovira, Julian Thomas, Julie Birchenall, Dana Challinor, Tim Hoverd, Keith Ray (https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959774322000142)

References

[[Category:]]