Core group members

Marianne Moen

Marianne Moen is a postdoctoral researcher on the project, working at the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo. With a PhD focused on gender in the Viking Age, she brings a research focus on identity, personhood and questions of value to the study of human sacrifice.

Furthermore, she has a research focus on production of knowledge and narratives of exclusion from a gendered perspective, with a particular interest in the interplay between archaeological knowledge and heritage.

Matthew Walsh

Matthew J. Walsh possesses a PhD in Anthropology from The University of Montana, with a specialization in Archaeology. He has worked as an archaeologist throughout much of the North American Pacific Northwest including Alaska and British Columbia, as well as in the Kuril Islands of the Russian Far East, Chilean Patagonia and in Greenland. Prior to his current work with Rane Willerslev's Human Sacrifice and Value project (FRIHUMSAM 275947) at the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo, he held postdoctoral positions at the Arctic Research Centre (ARC) at Aarhus University, Denmark, and with Karin Frei’s Tales of Bronze Age Women project (CF15-0878) at the National Museum of Denmark.

Matt's research interests focus on cultural transmission and cultural evolution studies. His broader research interests include evolutionary archaeology methods and theoretical frameworks, transdisciplinary approaches to cross-cultural comparative analyses and phylogenetic systematics, applied cultural evolution studies, settlement, subsistence, demography and evolution of complex hunter-gatherers, circumpolar Arctic and sub-Arctic prehistory and ethnoarchaeology, European Bronze Age and Early Iron Age, evolution of ritual- and sacrificial-violence, paleo- and historical- ecology, human-animal-environment relations and interactions, zooarchaeology, osteology and faunal analysis, as well as lithic technology and lithic artifact illustration.

Sean O’Neill

Anthropologist and archaeologist (MA UCL, PhD Aberdeen University, posting at Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, currently Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Aarhus, Denmark), Sean is co-editor of a book series on circumpolar cultures with Professor Rane Willerslev, for British academic publisher Routledge, Taylor & Francis.

His work focuses on tracing patterns of cultural transmission involved in material culture and technology traditions, political economy, social structure and cosmologies/ systems of belief. Sean has published work in numerous journals and collections, including the Philosophical Proceedings of the Royal Society B and with the Oxford University Press.

In 2015 he founded the Two Towers Press, which had two Nielsen International Bestsellers in its first year of trading. Prior to 2007, he was a transnational creative/ business director in media, with extensive work in Europe, Africa and the Middle East (EMEA). Post.Doc. WP I.

Svein H. Gullbekk

Svein H. Gullbekk is Professor of history and numismatics, Museum of Cultural History, Oslo University. He specialises in medieval Norwegian and European coinage, and economic and cultural history.

He has been PI for the project Religion and Money: Economy of Salvation in the Middle Ages funded by the Norwegian Research Council (2013-2017). He has curated several exhibitions and published and edited books and articles on subjects from Freedom and history of money to medieval coinage. 

Rane Willerslev

Rane Willerslev is a Danish anthropologist. In his academic career, he has travelled extensively and has a particular interest in traditional cosmologies such as animism, and subsistence economies and their adaptation in hunter-gatherer societies, both present and prehistoric.

On 1 July 2017, he was appointed director of the National Museum of Denmark. In Denmark, Willerslev is a popular media personality, engaging in TV and radio shows, public panel debates, and interviews relating to his academic interests and his opinions on society and education at large. He has written and co-authored several books, including academic, fictional and biographic works. Principle Investigator.

Published Jan. 11, 2019 9:43 AM - Last modified Oct. 5, 2022 11:10 AM