Dr Luciana Carvalho

As Property & Development Manager at Petros, I manage residential blocks and oversee the redevelopment of historical buildings, blending heritage preservation with modern adaptation. As a freelance heritage conservator, I’ve worked on archaeological missions in Jordan, Egypt and Sudan, caring for objects, providing training and overseeing interventions. At the School of Archaeology, I provide teaching support and co-supervise two PhD candidates. In the McCullagh Group at Oxford’s Department of Chemistry, I am using thermal desorption GC-MS/MS to identify flower and bacterial volatiles as part of a collaboration with Oxford’s Botanic Garden. And with proteomics expert Elisabete Pires, we continue to work with archaeologists and museums globally.

In my research I combine FT-IR, Raman, XRD, XPS, SEM-EDS and chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry techniques to address research questions. My diverse academic background - spanning Chemistry, Egyptology, Environment & Development and Archaeological Science - has led to pioneering work on copper-organic complexation (10.1007/978-3-030-97892-1). This protocol has revealed ancient food residues in a corroded copper vessel from Pompeii (10.1016/j.jasrep.2022.103638) and provided the first evidence for pesticides’ interaction with an archaeological object (10.1038/s41598-022-17902-9).

In 2022-2023, I secured funding from the American Research Centre in Egypt to lead a multinational and multidisciplinary team in creating the first photographic archive of historical mudbrick houses across three cities in Upper Egypt. Over 100 geotagged images are now accessible through Oxford’s HEIR archive HEIR (ox.ac.uk)  and a bilingual book (Beit Zaman: the old forgotten) blending photography and storytelling distributed worldwide. The initiative gained significant recognition in social media and news outlets, including a short film for Elsaha (Facebook), which garnered 4 million views.

Sponsored by: Prof Greger Larson