Two ERC Synergy Grants for Cambridge Archaeologists
Three Cambridge Archaeologists have been awarded ERC Synergy Grants; Prof Enrico Crema as co-PI of FORAGER, and Dr Stefania Merlo and Prof Paul Lane as collaborators of the AFRI-CAN Project.
The Synergy Grants are awarded by the European Research Council for small groups of co-PIs "working together and bringing different skills and resources to tackle ambitious research problems".
FORAGER: Investigating alternative trajectories for human demographic growth in temperate northern Holocene societies
An ERC Synergy Grant has been awarded to Prof Enrico Crema (University of Cambridge, UK), Prof. Oliver Craig (University of York, UK), Prof. Peter Jordan (Lund University, Sweden) and Prof Anna Marie Prentiss (University of Montana, USA) for the FORAGER Project.
The team aims to find why and how some hunter-gatherer societies experienced population growth comparable to that of early farming societies. The project will compare prehistoric hunter-gatherers from Japan, Pacific North West Coast, Atlantic North-East Coast, and the Baltic.
"Being able to this as part of a team of 37 scientists from 9 different institutions (UK, US, Canada, Sweden, Denmark, Estonia, and Japan) and 6 project partners/collaborators (including Xwistern and Anishnàbe First Nations) is a dream come true and something that many have wished for a long time. Only possible with how generous the ERC is."
After the end of the last Ice Age, warmer, more stable Holocene climates led to the development of entirely new food systems, which in turn triggered population booms across mid-latitude environments worldwide. These momentous changes are often reduced to simple linear narratives that trace a progression from mobile foraging to settled farming and from there to urbanisation and state formation.
This ‘agri-centric’ narrative is problematic because, in many cases, behaviours typically attributed to farming societies —e.g., storage, sedentism, and social complexity —developed well before agriculture and remained the dominant social-ecological system for much of the Holocene.
Moreover, such forager systems were capable of triggering population booms of a similar magnitude to those observed amongst early farming societies. The FORAGER project will bring together paleo-demographers, climate scientists, lab-based bioarchaeologists, and cultural anthropologists to understand the drivers and consequences of population expansion and decline in Holocene hunter-gatherer societies.
Working at unprecedented scale and leveraging the rich legacy data already available, these issues will be addressed systematically and synergistically across four temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere. The team will generate comparative insights into major patterns of cultural diversity that progressive, linear narratives of cultural change have long overlooked.
The project will also co-create new knowledge with Indigenous partners to elucidate existential possibilities long eclipsed by the recent historical penetration of industrialised farming into much of the temperate world. The team will aim to shed new light on a ‘lost chapter’ of demographic change, periods of great upheaval and resilience, highlighting the potential of alternative, and perhaps more sustainable, social-ecological systems.
The Cambridge team will also include Prof. Andrea Manica (Zoology) and Dr Matt Osman (Geography), and will focus on palaeodemography, palaeoecology, and climatic modelling.
AFRI-CAN: East African Mountains Social Ecological Dynamics
Changing climates, growing populations, biodiversity threats and agricultural transformations put mountains under pressure. These challenges impact local communities and the surrounding lowlands and have global impacts too, since mountains are often hotspots of biodiversity and act as carbon sinks.
With these increased pressures come questions about how interactions between humans and their environments will respond and what the implications of such responses might be for the humans and other species that constitute these mountain socioecological systems. Equally important is to understand how the current state of mountain socioecological systems emerged and evolved over time, especially during the Holocene.
To answer these questions, on this ERC Synergy project, an interdisciplinary team of researchers will be focussing on nine East African mountain settings to illustrate how deeper understanding of past trajectories of change and continuity can generate novel pathways for more sustainable futures. To achieve this, they will study the principal services provided by mountain ecosystems (food, energy and water) and biocultural diversity, and investigate how societies have exploited, co-existed with, and even enhanced nature. Observations from these dynamics in the past and present, will guide predictive modelling of future trajectories of change under different scenarios, with the goal of identifying options that will best support eastern Africa’s mountain socioecological systems as future opportunities and challenges emerge.
The research team includes four experts from the UK, South Africa, Spain, and Germany embedded with partners from Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, and will be led by Professor Rob Marchant (University of York), Professor Laura Pereira (University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa), Professor Unai Pascual (Basque Centre for Climate Change, Spain), and Professor Thomas Hickler (Senckenberg Institute, Germany).
Dr Stefania Merlo (University of Cambridge) and Prof Paul Lane (University of Cambridge) are collaborators on the project, and will help lead research with partners at the University of York on reconstructing the changing nature of human-environment relations on East Africa’s mountains over the last c. 6000 years, spanning the transition to food production and adoption of iron metallurgy to the start of the colonial era. A funded PhD student will be recruited to assist with this work.
"Being part of this project offers an unrivalled opportunity to demonstrate the applied value of archaeological and palaoecological datasets for understanding how human-environment interactions have shaped cultural and biological diversity across East Africa's mountains over the last six millennia, and the implications of these deep histories for designing more sustainable futures."
Published 6 November 2025
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