Melina Seabrook Named Renfrew Fellow at McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research

The Department of Anthropology at Harvard University is delighted to share that Melina Seabrook has been named a Renfrew Fellow at The University of Cambridge's McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. Melina is currently Black Heritage or Identity Research Fellow and focuses on bringing the role of animals to the forefront of our studies of developing urbanism in southwest Asia.

Following a BA in Anthropology from Stony Brook University, Dr Seabrook completed a Master's and PhD at Harvard University in 2025. Her PhD research examined sheep and goats from Tepe Yahya (Iran) and expanded on datasets using archaeological science methods.

In her role as Renfrew Fellow, Melina will work on her project Sumer by the Sea: The Marine Resources at the Foundation of Mesopotamian Urbanism. She plans to dismantle the traditional, terrestrial driven narrative of urban development in Ancient Mesopotamia by bringing the marine resources to the forefront of our investigations.

She will examine what marine resource utilisation looked like in ancient cities and how this shaped the resulting urban life. And answer the question, what marine animals were most used and why? This will be the first systematic study of marine species in these ancient cities.

Melina's research makes the concerted effort to bridge abstract discussions of marine utilisation and the faunal remains being found in the ancient cities. She will employ multidisciplinary methods centred on zooarchaeology and archaeological sciences. This interdisciplinary approach provides a starting point for expanding the, otherwise unobtainable, number of human-marine species interactions we can characterise in the past.

I look forward to continuing to share my passion for animals, the archaeology of Mesopotamia, and the exciting intersections of the two that we have yet to discover. - Melina Seabrook