Camila Alday
College roles
Phyllis and Eileen Gibbs Travelling Research Fellow 2024/25
Biography
Dr Camila Alday studies plant fibre objects in ancient South America. Her PhD (2017-2022) and current postdoctoral fellowship (2023-2025) at the University of Cambridge, have provided her with expertise in archaeological science, and allowed her to engage in cutting-edge research and develop innovative theoretical and methodological approaches. That has been critical to the development of new ways of thinking about fibre production processes, applying interdisciplinary techniques such as identification of plant fibres, and textile manufacturing processes. She has also refined laboratory methods for recovering microremains and used cutting-edge methods, including SEM and light microscopy, to deepen our understanding of fibre use in ancient coastal hunter-gatherers.
Research Interests
Dr Alday specializes in Archaeobotany of textile plants to reconstruct plant fibre production among early coastal hunter-gatherers (10,000-3,500 BP). Her research has been focused on the use of plant fibres as material culture in Pre-Columbian societies during the long Preceramic Period (10,000-3500 BP) along the Pacific coast. Camila is equally interested in developing methods and frameworks to understand past and present people’s social dynamics around plants for fibres, basketry and complex textile structures especially since they have been a neglected sphere of material culture in archaeological research.
Her current project at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, titled Early plant domestication and fabric technologies: new approaches to study South America’s cotton (Gossypium barbadense) focuses on the process of South America’s cotton selection and early uses and how we can better understand this process by integrating archaeobotanical, and structural analyses. Her research aims to advance archaeobotanical methods and generate new data to investigate the ecological and technological aspects of cotton technologies and its cultivation for textile production among early hunter-gatherer societies on South America's west coast.