Jay Stephens

My research interests include archaeometallurgy, technology, and geochemical and archaeometric provenance studies. For the last 10 years, I have co-directed the Southern Africa Lead Isotope Project, which uses isotopic, chemical, and micro-structural methods to reconstruct the provenance, or geological source, for non-ferrous metals in southern Africa and the technologies with which they were produced. My work aims to understand how participating communities across southern Africa negotiated their access to materials in the face of diverse social changes, such as the rise of states, mass migration, and arrival of European colonial forces. It is within this context that I study the Letaba archaeo-metallurgical assemblages.

Read more about my work here.