Čaval Saša

Dr. Saša Čaval is a lecturer and a researcher at Stanford Archaeology Center (SAC) and the Institute for Research in Social Sciences (IRiSS) at Stanford University. She obtained her undergraduate and graduate degrees at the Department of Archaeology, University of Ljubljana in Slovenia. She explores religion in past plural societies from the perspective of astronomical strategies embedded in sacred architecture (Cultural Astronomy), through the medieval institutionalized and heretic beliefs in the Western Balkans (Funerary archaeology) and the plural societies that emerged during colonial times in the Indian Ocean World (Historical Archaeology). Between 2018 and 2021, Saša was awarded the prestigious Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship at the University of Reading, UK, to work on the medieval Western Balkans’ stećci phenomenon. She published in international journals, like Remote Sensing, International Journal for Historical Archaeology, PloS One, Journal of Archaeological Science, World Archaeology, as well as Studia Universitatis Hereditati and Arheološki Vestnik.

Research projects: She leads and collaborates in various projects and programs (The Land of Stećci: multiculturality in the medieval Herzegovina; Disease confinement in the Adriatic; Mauritian Archaeology and Cultural Heritage (MACH) project group; Omics Initiative program). Saša is also an instructor in the Digital Humanities seminar AI for Handwriting Recognition of Historical Burial Records: a case study of the Bois Marchand cemetery in Mauritius (IRiSS, Stanford University). In addition, she also oversees an annual international summer archaeological school in either Bosnia and Herzegovina or Mauritius, in which primary research is being conducted with state-of-the-art methods and scientific sampling techniques.