Sirio Canós-Donnay is an archaeologist and AHRC-funded PhD candidate at UCL. Born in Spain, she read Archaeology & Anthropology at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, and holds a masters in African Archaeology from UCL.
Since 2013 Sirio has been directing excavations in the Upper Casamance region in southern Senegal (West Africa), researching the hitherto unknown archaeology of the Kaabu Empire (13th-19th C). Her work combines archaeology, oral traditions, and written accounts from European travellers, and explores how West African history challenges some of our traditional assumptions about societal development and statehood worldwide.