COPPE Justin

Biography

Justin Coppe, graduated in 2013 from the University of Liège, with a Master¿s thesis on the technological analysis of the recent Mousterian industry of Scladina cave (Belgium). Through a large corpus of refitting, he searched to prove the contemporaneity of the assemblage studied (level 1A) and to understand the ¿chaine opératoire¿ used by Neanderthals.

For his Ph.D. (obtained in 2020 at the University of Liege), he focused on the identification of projectiles and projection systems in the Palaeolithic. The work focused on the development of a method that permits the identification of propulsion modes based on use-related traces preserved on lithic projectiles. It builds, on the one hand, on work done on fracture mechanics of brittle solids in the context of developing technological and functional analyses of stone tools and, on the other, on ballistic analysis of different modes of propulsion that could have been used in the Palaeolithic. These two elements are closely intertwined in our approach and are the base to understand the phenomenon of impact damage creation. These phenomena were explored thanks to a large sequential experimental program. The doctoral research was part of an ERC starting grant on the evolution of hafting during the Palaeolithic (EVO-HAFT 2013 ¿ 2017), led by Dr. Veerle Rots.

He is currently working as a postdoctoral fellow on the project untilted Paleolithic hunting technology led by Dr. Veerle Rots and financed by the FNRS. The goal of this project is to track the evolution of hunting technology during the European middle and upper Palaeolithic. This is done through the use of the systematic large-scale functional analysis of key sites supported by dedicated experimental programs.