Dr Emma Loftus is an archaeologist trained in stable isotopes and radiocarbon dating methods, which she applies to Middle and Later Stone Age records in southern Africa.
She is currently researching shellfishing behaviours of hunter-gatherers who lived on the west coast of South Africa, using serially sampled oxygen isotope records from archaeological shells.
Dr Loftus Co-Developed the Southern African Radiocarbon Database.
She completed her doctoral thesis in November 2016 and was supervised by Profs. Julia Lee-Thorp and Judith Sealy, reconstructed Pleistocene and Holocene sea surface temperatures off the south coast of South Africa, from marine shells preserved in archaeological shell middens.
Dr Loftus completed her Master's degree (2013) at the University of Oxford, researching environments around the Middle and Later Stone Age site Sehonghong, in the Lesotho highlands. As part of her Honours degree at the University of Cape Town (2010), she researched variability in carbon isotope ratios between different tissues of Later Stone Age hunter-gatherer skeletons from the Western Cape, South Africa.
