Mikkel Johansen Nørtoft

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Primary fields of research

PhD Fellow at Department of Prehistoric Archaeology at the Saxo Insititute with the project "Social Dynamics in Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe: Investigating the male dominance narrative through archaeology, aDNA and linguistics" (Principal Supervisor: Ass. Prof. Rune Iversen). This project focuses on identifying and quantifying social inequality in Neolithic and Bronze Age cemeteries from grave data such as grave goods, burial architecture and more combined with ancient DNA data (where available) to investigate if a change in inequality can be measured before and after herders from the Pontic-Caspian steppes spread in Europe c. 2900 BCE.

I have an MA in Indo-European studies, and early on focused my studies on multidisciplinary approaches to Indo-European topics to illuminate culture and the branching of Indo-European languages and migrations by combining language, archaeology, genetics and whatever disciplines that may be relevant in the investigation of a topic.

I worked as a Research Assistant at Evolutionary Genomics, SUND, UCPH, online mapping migrations through ancient genomes, at https://ancientgenomes.com

In my MA thesis, "Shaving the Warrior", I combined linguistics and archaeology when studying the antiquity of the archaeological ”beauty kits” of Bronze elite warriors vs. the ideology and rituals of Bronze Age elite warriors. 

Additionally, I examined Germanic contacts in prehistory through prehistoric loanwords, archaeology and genetics to find out when ancestral Germanic speech appeared in Scandinavia. 

I was also affiliated with the Centre for Textile Research (CTR) at Saxo, UCPH as a guest researcher, where I was part of the steering group of ”The CTR Makerpspace for Textile Heritage”. My primary contribution to this project was to teach Geographical Information Systems (GIS) to empower researchers to create their own maps for publications, etc, as well as teaching how to make podcasts for the Fabric of My Life project at CTR. I also contributed with an interactive online atlas of archaeological textiles, which I now also help to develop further with a larger team into an online textile heritage atlas for the COST EuroWeb project in collaboration with CTR.