Dr Akshyeta Suryanarayan

Dr Akshyeta Suryanarayan is a Wainwright Fellow in Near Eastern Archaeology at the University of Oxford, hosted at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on ancient food systems, human–environment interactions, and exchange networks in Bronze Age South Asia and the Arabian Peninsula, using biomolecular and archaeological science approaches. She previously held a MSCA-COFUND EUTOPIA Fellowship at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain) and a Fyssen Foundation Fellowship at CNRS (Nice, France), where she led independent research projects on ancient foodways and organic residue analysis in ceramics.

Dr Suryanarayan has taught and supervised students across a range of topics including archaeological method and theory, ancient Mesopotamia and the Indus Civilisation, and biomolecular methods to investigate foodways in the past. She is actively engaged in international research collaborations, postgraduate training, and public engagement initiatives, including co-founding the Untold Histories museum tours in Cambridge (2018–2020), which explored the colonial histories of archaeological collections in Cambridge and won the Outstanding Contribution to Student Education Award for Inclusive Practice by the University of Cambridge in 2019. She has published widely in leading international journals on archaeological science, and is currently preparing a Cambridge Elements volume on ancient South Asian foodways.