Short Bio

Youssef Djellal is a Ph.D. student at the University of Algarve and holds a Ph.D. Grant (UIDP/04211/2020) funded by FCT, acquired through ICArEHB. He is also a member of the International Caves Morocco project responsible for the excavation of several key sites in Morocco, such as Taforalt, Rhafas, and Bizmoune caves.

He holds a BA in Archaeology and Anthropology (2016) at the National Institute of Archaeology and Heritage (INSAP) in Morocco, in which he developed a protocol of use-wear analysis on lithic tools that he applied on stone tools from the Middle Stone Age (MSA) contexts of Taforalt and Dar-es-Soltan 1 caves. During his master’s project, he developed the same protocol and applied it to study the MSA non-flint tools from Rhafas cave. This project was undertaken between INSAP (Morocco) and the University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis (France).

Currently, he is undertaking his Ph.D. between Algarve University (Portugal) and MONREPOS center (Germany) in which he aims to understand the place of North Africa within the emergence and the spread of the Human complex cognition through the techno-functional study of the MSA lithics.

Since 2015, Youssef Djellal participated in several international congresses and workshops such as the European Society for the Study of Human Evolution (ESHE) in Faro (Portugal) The Association of Archaeological Wear and Residue Analysts (AWRANA) in Nice (France) and the PAN-African congress (PANAF) in Rabat (Morocco). In December 2021, he was awarded the Leakey Foundation grant for his Ph.D. project.