Professor Ioana Oltean

Prof. Ioana Oltean specialises in the archaeology of the Roman Empire, particularly in its European provinces, and in the application of above-ground remote sensing and of digital technologies in archaeological research. She is interested in the reconstruction of ancient landscapes, particularly those of the Late Iron Age to the Roman period in the Lower Danube area and in NW Iberia, in order to quantify the nature and extent of their change through Roman imperialist expansion. She has been involved since 1998 in establishing aerial reconnaissance as a standard method of archaeological prospection in Romania (browse online photo archive).

Ioana Oltean is the author of Dacia: Landscape, Colonization and Romanization (Routledge, 2007) and co-editor of Archaeology from Historical Aerial and Satellite Archives (Springer 2013) and of Understanding Roman Frontiers (Birlinn 2015).

Biography:

Ioana Oltean gained her Bachelor’s (Licenta) and Master’s degrees in history and archaeology at the Babes-Bolyai University ( Cluj Napoca, Romania). In 2004 she obtained her PhD in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Glasgow, where she subsequently became a British Academy Post-Doctoral Research Fellow (2004-2007). She joined University of Exeter in September 2007.

She is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries (2010) and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland (2009); member of the Aerial Archaeology Research Group (1998) and of the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies (2002). She is a regular contributor to the International Congresses of Roman Frontier Studies; Roman Archaeology Conferences and the Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conferences. She has been the chair of the Working Party on Teaching Aerial Archaeology of the European Archaeological Council and the Aerial Archaeological Research Group (2007-2009). She was a member of the General Management Board of the EU-funded ArchaeoLandscapes Europe project (2010-15) and was a panel assessor for Newton International Fellowships of the British Academy and Royal Society (2008-2010), for AHRC (2014-16) and is a regular assessor for European Council (MSCA, Horizon) and for a range of international funding bodies. She advised the National History Museum of Transylvania and the Ministry of Culture in Romania on the application of remote sensing to the management and research of the Dacian Citadels of Orastie Mountains World Heritage Site and for the preparation of nomination for that status of the Roman frontier in Romania. She collaborated with the BBC 1 for the making of the documentary Rome's Lost Empire (2012). She leads cultural heritage applications of drone technologies, AI and Knowledge graphs in real-world scenarios as part of EU-funded projects. 

Research supervision:

Prof. Ioana Oltean supervises research students in the following areas:

• the archaeology of the Roman Empire
• late Iron Age archaeology
• settlement patterns
• ancient connectivity and natural resources extraction
• GIS
• archaeological remote sensing
• digital and AI applications in archaeology and cultural heritage