Cecilia Dal Zovo is a visiting postdoctoral researcher at the Institut für Turkologie, thanks to a Xunta de Galicia/GAIN Fellowship from the Institute of Heritage Science of the Spanish National Research Council.

She holds a master’s degree in Prehistoric Archaeology from the University of Padua (Italy) and a Ph.D. in History (2016) magna cum laude from the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain). In 2107, her dissertation Archaeology of a sacred mountain, mounds water, mobility, and cosmologies of Ikh Bogd Uul, Mongolia received the Specialist Dissertation accolade from the ICAS (International Congress of Asia Scholars) Book and Dissertation Prize and has been granted the Extraordinary PhD Award from the University of Santiago de Compostela (2018).

As a graduate and post-graduate student, Dal Zovo investigated cultural heritage, pastoral and funerary landscapes, and rock art in different mountain environments, joining research projects in northern Italy, NW Spain, Sweden, and Mongolia.

Presently, she collaborates with two international research projects: The Burial Mounds of Central Tibet, directed by Dr. Hazod, Institute of Social Anthropology, Austrian Academy of Sciences; and Agriculture, community, and desert: agricultural practices and community organisation in the Prehispanic Atacama Desert, directed by Dr. Parcero, Institute of Heritage Sciences, Spanish National Research Council.

Her research interests encompass migrations, linguistics, mobility networks, frontiers, pastoralism, sacred geographies, funerary rituality, Buddhist and Lamaist landscapes, cultural astronomy, mapping, spatial analysis, critical heritage, longue durée and interdisciplinary research methodology in Mongolia and Central and Eastern Eurasia.

 

At the Institut für Turkologie, Dr. Dal Zovo is currently working on her first monograph. At the same time, she is pursuing her post-doctoral project Time in Place: material and immaterial heritage of the Altai Mountains in a Eurasian perspective. Thanks to the support of Prof. Ragagnin, Dr. Dal Zovo explores ancient Turkic sources -and connected material culture, cosmologies, and landscapes-. This research will be further developed at the School of Archaeology of the University of Oxford (2019) and at the Institute of Heritage Sciences of the Spanish National Research Council (2020).