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Guillem Domingo Ribas

Guillem's subject area is archaeology. His PhD project title is 'Simulating the Long-Term Relationship Between Pastoral Systems and the Making of Historic Landscapes: Land use, Livestock Management and Mobility in Devon (UK) and Aspromonte (Italy)'

Project title

Simulating the Long-Term Relationship Between Pastoral Systems and the Making of Historic Landscapes: Land use, Livestock Management and Mobility in Devon (UK) and Aspromonte (Italy)

Supervisors:

Guillem Domingo Ribas

Project Description

Managed grazing, or pastoralism, occupies a quarter of the global land surface and sustains millions of people worldwide, according to FAO estimates. While livestock mobility has a critical function for the conservation of fragile ecosystems, it is viewed as one of the main triggers of landscape change and it provides a unique character in many rural areas, particularly where crops are less likely to grow. However, detecting and recognising pastoral sites and practices remain significant challenges in the study of past pastoral communities.

To address this, interdisciplinary approaches – particularly computational and ethnoarchaeological – are increasingly used for their capacity to both record and simulate pastoral mobility and production patterns, and their impact on landscapes. Building on this, this project explores the long-term relationship between pastoralism and landscape transformation through case studies in Devon (UK) and the Aspromonte (Italy):

Aspromonte (Italy)

  • Conducted ethnoarchaeological fieldwork to record pre-industrial pastoral practices, mobility and landscape occupation
  • Developed an Agent-Based Model (ABM) to simulate spatially explicit grazing strategies, generating different grazing and flock distribution scenarios, tested against real data.

Devon (UK)

  • Analysed and processed archaeological and historic landscape information about Bronze Age and Medieval periods
  • Simulated livestock mobility through cutting edge approaches to define potential long-distance transhumance corridors between summer and winter grazing locations, quantitatively assessing whether they influenced the formation of Devon’s historic landscape

This project has been funded through a NUAcT PhD Scholarship.

Publications

  • Garcia-Casas, D., & Domingo-Ribas, G. (Eds.) (2025 - in press). Towards an Archaeology of Pastoralism in Southwest Europe. Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature
  • Domingo-Ribas, G., & Brandolini, F. 2024. Palaeo-landscape feature identification: a FOSS cloud- based Python approach through Google Earth Engine (GEE). GROMA: Documenting Archaeology, 7, 26–33. https://doi.org/10.32028/Groma-Issue-7-2022-2421
  • Medina, S., Fructuoso, X., Domingo, G., Freixas, T., Batlle, S. 2023. New perspectives on Digital Archaeology: From production to usability of data. A Carbonell, S. et al. (Ed.), Periferias: desde los márgenes de la arqueología. JIA-LACANT 2022 (pp. 519 – 526). Alacant: INAPH i Publicacions Universitat d’Alacant. http://hdl.handle.net/10045/134475
  • Brandolini, F.; Domingo-Ribas, G.; Zerboni, A., et al. 2021. A Google Earth Engine-enabled Python approach for the identification of anthropogenic palaeo-landscape features [version 2; peer review: 2 approved, 1 approved with reservations]. Open Research Europe 2021, 1:22 https://doi.org/10.12688/openreseurope.13135.2
  • Brandolini, F.; Domingo-Ribas, G. 2021. A Colab-Python script code to identify palaeo-landscape features. In Open Research Europe (1.1.0, Vol. 2021, Number 1, p. 22). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5235030
  • Travé, E.; Álvaro, K.; Domingo, G. 2020. Arqueología de la producción en el yacimiento de Revenga (Comunero de Revenga, Burgos): elementos para el análisis de espacios productivos en entornos rupestres altomedievales (s. V-IX d.C.). Archeologia Medievale: XLVII, 183-198 https://doi.org/10.36153/am47.2020.10
  • Travé, E.; Álvaro, K.; Domingo, G. 2020. Métodos y problemas interpretativos en los estudios de cerámica utilitaria: los materiales cerámicos y sus limitaciones en el yacimiento de Revenga, Burgos (s. VI-XI). Archivo Español de Arqueología. 93, (sep. 2020), 229–247. https://doi.org/10.3989/aespa.093.020.012
  • Travé, E.; Domingo, G.; Vicens, J.; Mauri, A. 2019. Morfometría de cerámicas grises catalanas: algunas consideraciones sobre la definición de tipos en cerámica común de época medieval y postmedieval. Zephyrus, 84, 161-182. https://doi.org/10.14201/zephyrus201984161182

Qualifications

  • MSc in Geographical Information Science and Archaeology, The University of Edinburgh – 2017-2108
    • MSc dissertation: A QGIS Plugin explore landscape connectivity through least-cost path networks and circuit theory (Award: Best Dissertation Prize 2018).
  • BA in Archaeology, University of Barcelona (Spain) – 2013-2017

Teaching

  • HCA1003 – Global Middle Ages (2023)
  • HCA1008 – Global Ancient Histories (2021, 2022, 2023)

Other roles

  • Fieldwork experience: actively taking part in archaeological excavations and surveys since 2014, having co-directed some of the campaigns.
  • Conferences: active participation in international conferences through presentation of conference papers and session organisation.
  • Organiser of the Newcastle University Spatial Humanities Seminars (2023).
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