Katarina Jerbić earned an MA in Archaeology and Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Zagreb, Croatia. She has been working as an archaeologist for more than 10 years on various archaeological excavations as well as a curator in an archaeological museum. Her scientific interest has always leaned towards European Prehistory and its diversity, especially in her home country of Croatia and its Adriatic coast.

In 2020 Katarina completed her PhD at Flinders University with a scholarship from the Foundation. The title of her these is “Zambratija: A 6000-year-old pile-dwelling submerged under the Adriatic Sea”. The thesis was examined with minor corrections, and the final and accepted revision was submitted to Flinders University in March 2020.

The thesis tackled questions of human adaptations and interactions with changing climate events in the past, by using archaeological and environmental evidence from the submerged pile-dwelling in Zambratija Bay, Croatia. The results were based on a fieldwork research in May 2017, where Katarina organised and performed seabed coring and diver-based data collection on site. The fieldwork and later laboratory work was organised in collaboration with the Arhaeological Museum of Istria in Pula (Croatia), Croatian Geological Survey, Aix-Marseille University (France) and the University of York (UK).The original results derived from 3 seabed sediment cores and 11 wooden pile samples. These results, presented in the form of radiocarbon dates, a paleoenvironmental reconstruction with regards to sea-level change and a 62-year-old dendrochronological sequence, answered relevant questions with not only local, but also broader implications regarding submerged archaeological research, European and World prehistory and modern-day climate change issues. Additionally, the thesis also suggests a methodological concept provisionally called Archaeology of the Core, which is based on applying basic archaeological excavation and post-excavation methods to seabed core samples.

Throughout her candidature Katarina has presented the theoretical and methodological aspects of her research on several occasions by attending international conferences: in 2019 INQUA in Dublin (Ireland), SAA in Albuquerque (New Mexico); in 2018 EAA in Barcelona (Spain), UISPP in Paris (France), in 2017 the Honor Frost conference in Nicosia (Cyprus); and in 2016 IKUWA-6 in Fremantle (Western Australia).