Every footprint, hearth, and fragment of waste tells a story — even if it’s thousands of years old.

I am Dr. Natalia Égüez, a geo-ethnoarchaeologist currently working at the Institute of Natural Products and Agrobiology (IPNA) in Tenerife (Spain), which belongs to the network of research centres of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), a State Agency under the Ministry of Science and Innovation. My work sits at the intersection of archaeology, anthropology, and the natural sciences, allowing me to explore how past human communities interacted with and adapted to their surrounding environments. I am particularly interested in how cultural practices shape landscapes over time, and how these transformations can be traced through microscopic and molecular markers preserved in the archaeological record.

Within the Social Sciences, Heritage, and Food Research Group (Department of Life and Earth Sciences), I lead the BIOMARQ Laboratory, an interdisciplinary space dedicated to investigating adaptation strategies, pastoral mobility, and animal exploitation in historical and prehistoric societies. Our research integrates ethnoarchaeological fieldwork with biomolecular approaches to better understand domestic activities, resource management, and human-animal relationships across diverse ecological contexts. Through this work, we aim to bridge past and present, generating new insights into cultural resilience, subsistence strategies, and the formation of archaeological sites.

I am also affiliated with the Archaeological Micromorphology and Biomarkers Lab (AMBI LAB, IUBO-AG), University of La Laguna (Tenerife, Spain) and the Department of Anthropology, University of California Davis (United States).

Research Interests
Overall, my research focuses on understanding the socio-economic dynamics of human groups and their relationships with animals, paying close attention to how people adapt to natural environments and shape them into cultural landscapes.

In 2018, I completed my PhD in Natural Sciences at the University of Kiel (Germany). Focused on geo-ethnoarchaeology, I connect human behaviors observed in present-day communities with the traces those activities leave in the archaeological record. By combining soil micromorphology, lipid analysis, proteomics, and stable isotope biochemistry, I recover microscopic and molecular signatures from both ancient and modern domestic spaces. This microcontextual biomarker approach allows us to reconstruct details of the palaeoenvironment, trophic cascades, seasonality, diet, and even an individual’s biological sex. My particular fascination lies in the taphonomy of excrements and other organic remains from hunter-gatherer and nomadic pastoralist sites — small traces that open big windows into the past.

Do not hesitate to contact me at natalia.eguez@ipna.csic.es or neguezgo@ull.edu.es