Dr. Jan Kolář is an archaeologist interested in human-environment interactions in the past. He focuses on studying the relationship between major social and economic transformations, population dynamics, changes in land use and climate during the prehistory. In his research he often utilises large-scale archaeological databases and modelling approaches and combines the results with quantified outcomes of other disciplines, mostly palaeoecology.

He received his PhD from the Masaryk University in Brno (Czech Republic) in 2015. In his doctoral thesis he focused on investigating of the local interactions in the 3rd millennium BCE in the Czech Republic. During his studies he participated on dozens of excavations in the Czech Republic and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Before joining the COREX project he worked at the Institute of Botany of the Czech Academy of Sciences, where he participated on the project “Long-term woodland dynamics in Central Europe: from estimations to a realistic model” (http://longwood.cz) funded by the ERC (2012-2016) and he was a PI of the project “Land use, social transformations and woodland in Central European Prehistory. Modelling approaches to human-environment interactions” funded by the Czech Science Foundation (2019-2022). In 2017/2018 he was a Fulbright Research Fellow at the Department of Anthropology of the University of Pennsylvania. For his interdisciplinary research Jan received awards from the Czech Academy of Sciences and the Masaryk University.