Mikkel Johansen Nørtoft

Mikkel Johansen Nørtoft

Research Assistant

Primary fields of research

PhD Fellow at Department of Prehistoric Archaeology at the Saxo Insititute with the project "Social Dynamics in the Eneolithic Czech Corded Ware culture" (Main Supervisor: Rune Iversen). This project focuses on developing new methods in quantifying observable grave wealth display and social inequality. The case study attempts to identify and quantify grave wealth and social inequality in Czech Corded Ware culture graves from grave goods, burial architecture and resource mobility combined with ancient DNA data and skeletal pathologies (where available) to investigate how social inequality developed when herders from the Pontic-Caspian steppes spread in Europe from c. 2900 BCE.

I have an MA in Indo-European studies, and early on focused my studies on multidisciplinary approaches to Indo-European topics to illuminate culture and the branching of Indo-European languages and migrations by combining language, archaeology, genetics and whatever disciplines that may be relevant in the investigation of a topic.

In my MA thesis, "Shaving the Warrior" (supervisor: James Alan Johnson), I combined linguistics and archaeology when studying the antiquity of the archaeological ”beauty kits” of Bronze elite warriors vs. the ideology and rituals of Bronze Age elite warriors. 

I worked as a Research Assistant at Evolutionary Genomics, SUND, UCPH, online mapping migrations through ancient genomes, archaeological cultures, and language areas at https://ancientgenomes.com

Additionally, I examined Germanic contacts in prehistory through prehistoric loanwords, archaeology and genetics to find out when ancestral Germanic speech appeared in Scandinavia. 

I was also a guest reseracher at the Centre for Textile Research (CTR) at Saxo, UCPH, where I started mapping an interactive online atlas of archaeological textiles prototype, which we have now developed further into a more comprehensive online textile heritage atlas in the COST EuroWeb project in collaboration with CTR and textile researchers from around Europe.

Teaching

Copper Age Central Europe, Quantitative archaeology, prehistoric wealth inequality, prehistoric migrations, archaeolinguistics

ID: 182566493