Mgr. Martin Novák, Ph.D.

Mgr. Martin Novák, Ph.D. is an archaeologist specializing in the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic periods of Central Europe. He studied archaeology and geology at the Faculty of Arts of Comenius University in Bratislava and earned his PhD in archaeology at the Faculty of Arts of Masaryk University in Brno. Since 2002, he has worked at the Institute of Archaeology of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Brno, where he is a research fellow and Head of the Centre for Prehistoric Archaeology. Since 2016, he has also taught at the Department of History of the Faculty of Arts at Palacký University Olomouc. Prior to this, he worked at the Institute of Archaeology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Košice.

His research focuses primarily on the Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic periods, the analysis of chipped stone industries, the spatial organization of settlements, and the reconstruction of prehistoric hunter-gatherer behaviour. He has participated in the research and evaluation of major Moravian Gravettian sites, particularly Dolní Věstonice I and II, Pavlov I, II and VI, Milovice IV, Předmostí I, and Ostrava-Petřkovice, as well as Mesolithic rock shelters in northern Bohemia.

He was the principal investigator of the Czech Science Foundation project “Hunters at the Settlement: Reconstructing Spatial Behaviour at Moravian Gravettian Sites” and is involved in the ERC project MAMBA, which focuses on the study of mammoth bone accumulations in Central Europe. From 2020 to 2023, he served as a member of the Czech Science Foundation evaluation panel for archaeology and ancient history. He is the author and co-author of numerous scholarly studies and has long combined field research with interdisciplinary analytical methods.

Selected publications:

• Chlachula, D., Marko, A., Moník, M., Cristiani, E., Gregar, F., Hamrozi, P., Marko, J., Novotný, J., Pluháček, T., Zupancich, A., Novák, M. 2025: Tracking the Hunter: A Study of the Personal Gear of a Gravettian Hunter-Gatherer from Milovice IV. Journal of Paleolithic Archaeology, 8 (1), č. článku 24, 1-21.

• Svoboda, J., Novák, M., Sázelová, S., Demek, J. 2016: Pavlov I: A large Gravettian site in space and time. Quaternary International 406, 95-105.

• Svoboda, J., Hladilová, Š., Horáček, I., Kaiser, J., Králík, M., Novák, J., Novák, M., Pokorný, P., Sázelová, S., Smolíková, L., Zikmund, T. 2015: Dolní Věstonice IIa: Gravettian microstratigraphy, environment, and the origin of baked clay production in Moravia. Quaternary International 359-360, 195-210.

• Svoboda, J., Bochenski, Z.,  Čulíková, V., Dohnalová, A., Hladilová, Š., Hložek, M., Horáček, I., Ivanov, M., Králík, M., Novák, M., Pryor, A. J. E., Sázelová, S., Stevens, R. E., Wilczyński, J., Wojtal, P. 2011: Paleolithic Hunting in a Southern Moravian Landscape: The Case of Milovice IV, Czech republic. Geoarchaeology: An International Journal, 26, 6, 836-866.

• Svoboda, J., Králík, M., Čulíková, V., Hladilová, Š., Novák, M., Nývltová Fišáková, M., Nývlt, D., Zelinková, M. 2009: Pavlov VI: an Upper Paleolithic living unit. Antiquity 83, 282-295.

• Svoboda, J., Hajnalová, M., Novák, M., Šajnerová, A., Yaroshevich, A. 2007: Mesolithic settlement and activities in rockshelters of the Kamenice river canyon, Czech Republic. Eurasian Prehistory 5 (1), 95-127.

• Svoboda, J., Novák, M. 2004: Eastern Central Europe after the Upper Pleniglacial: Changing the points of observation. Archäologisches Korrespondenzblatt 34, 463-477.