Dr Ulla Rajala MCIfA
Magister Philosophicae (Turku, Finland)
MA (Bristol)
PhD (Cantab)
Member of the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists
Responsibilities
- Archaeology tutor
- Vaughan Archaeology Discovery Circle
- LVC Social Media
Biography
I am a former Director of the Leicester Vaughan College and currently managing LVC’s social media. I have been teaching mature students at university level since 2003. I taught at the now Professional and Continuing Education at Cambridge together with the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA). I am currently affiliated with Stockholm University in Sweden, but living and working in Leicester. I am the incoming Archaeology editor of the Transactions of the Leicestershire Archaeological Society and an editor in the Open Archaeology. I am also an active member of the Leicestershire Fieldworkers and participating as a volunteer in finds processing and excavation.
Teaching Areas
I teach archaeology and lead the Archaeology Discovery Circle from July 2026.
Research Areas
My own main research area is central Italian archaeology. I have run the Nepi Survey Project in the field north of Rome as part of the Tiber Valley Project of the British School at Rome and led funerary excavations at Crustumerium in northern Rome. I have also managed the Stockholm Volterra Project with its programme of geophysical survey. Before becoming a pre-Roman and Roman archaeologist, I was a lithics specialist and I have worked on quartz in Finland and flint in Italy.
I have always been interested in archaeological computing and in my PhD I examined the settlement patterns, urbanization and land use in central Italy using GIS. At Stockholm I studied inscriptions and funerary architecture and involved network analysis in my studies. I am currently in the Management Committee of the Managing AI in Archaeology (MAIA) COST Action and in the organizing committee of the iGaias network.
One line of research I also carry out are interviews. I have studied the archaeological mentalities central Italian funerary archaeologists have towards their research, the dead and their ancestors and the theoretical involvement of computer archaeologists.
Publications
– Fulminante, F., Rajala, U., Citter, C., Brughmans, T., and Lewis, J. 2024 (eds.). Novel Approaches to Past Transportation Systems. Continuity and Discontinuity from Antiquity to the Present, Special Issue, Journal of Archaeological Science at https://www.sciencedirect.com/special-issue/10MBF8520FZ
– Rajala, U., and Emanuelsson-Paulson, T. 2027 (eds.). The materiality of Roman archaeology: What do the monuments stand for. Oxbow.
– Rajala, U., 2023. ‘The cemetery areas and the changing networks in central Italy c. 800-100 BC: the role of funerary architecture in defining identity and mental distances’. In R. Da Vela, M. Franceschini and F. Mazzilli (eds.), Networks as Resources for Ancient Communities, 129-161. Tübingen: ResourceCultures.
– Madella, M., Korisettar, R., Rajala, U., Ruiz-Giralt, A., Lancelotti, C. and Parque, Ó, 2022. ‘Surveying and collecting integrated data for the Neolithic ashmounds of Southern India’, in R. Korisettar (ed.), Stones and More Stones, Site Specific Studies in Indian Archaeology 3, 96-119. Bengaluru: The Mythic Society.
– Rajala, U., and Mills, P., 2017a. ‘Introduction: from taskscape to ceramiscene and beyond’, in U. Rajala and P. Mills (eds.). Forms of dwelling: 20 years of taskscapes in archaeology, 1-15. Oxford: Oxbow.
– Rajala, U., and Mills, P., 2017b. ‘Interpreting a ceramiscene: characterising late republican and imperial landscapes’, in U. Rajala and P. Mills (eds.). Forms of dwelling: 20 years of taskscapes in archaeology, 62-84. Oxford: Oxbow.
– Rajala, U., 2016. ‘Nested identities and mental distances: Archaic burials in Latium Vetus’, in E. Perego and R. Scopacasa (eds.). Burial and Social Change in Ancient Italy 9th–5th century BC: Approaching Social Agents, 161-193. Oxford: Oxbow.
– Rajala, U., 2016. ‘Pre-colonial Latin colonies and the transition to the Middle Republican period: Orientalizing and Archaic settlement evidence from the Nepi Survey’, Papers of the British School at Rome 84, 1-72.
– Rajala, U., 2016. ‘Separating the Emotions: Archaeological Mentalities in Central Italian Funerary Archaeology’, in H. Williams and M. Giles (eds.). Archaeologists and the Dead: Mortuary Archaeology in Contemporary Society, 68-96. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
– Rajala, U., forthcoming. ‘Theory in archaeology, theory in computing 1: cross-fertilisation in CAA and TAG conferences between archaeological theory and computer applications’, Journal of Computer Applications in Archaeology.