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Department of Archaeology

 

Displaying 21 projects

Digital Humanities Research Project and Interactive Digital Rock-Art Gallery.
This project looks at public attitudes and engagements with newly built chambered tombs which seek to replicate a prehistoric form for the internment of modern cremations.
A multidisciplinary project investigating the interrelations between crop plants, insect pollinators, and human management in prehistory.
Co-production Networks for Community Heritage in Tanzania.
Coastal Origins: Earliest human occupation of the shoreline
ENCOUNTER investigates the Jomon-Yayoi transition, a demic and cultural diffusion event that led the predominantly hunting, gathering, and fishing-based communities of the Japanese islands to adopt rice and millet farming during the 1st millennium BC.
Now represented by only two living genera restricted to tropical forests, sloths once were a dominant group within South American ecosystems until as recently as 10 ka, right before the last ice age extinction. Fossil sloths are considered plant eaters, like their modern relatives, but their...
Food globalisation in prehistory (FOGLIP) project employs archaeobotany, genetics, stable isotope analyses and ethno-archaeology to establish when and how early globalisation of staple foodstuffs occurred.
Farmers at the Shoreline is a British Academy-funded project to survey and excavate coastal shell midden sites associated with the earliest black farming communities in South Africa. The project will locate cryptic archaeological sites in iSimangaliso Wetland Park in KwaZulu-Natal, one of the few...
The last decades have witnessed marked achievements of STEM in understanding the remains of humans, animals, and plants from the past by analyzing different materials, both inorganic and organic. These developments have opened-up the great potential for increasing our understanding of cultural...
How did our ancestors walk? Perhaps the greatest challenge that this question has posed in the past, is the lack of methodological applications in which no study has previously reconstructed how our ancestors moved using biomechanical modelling techniques. We need to consider not just individual...
In Africa is a five-year research programme to investigate the origins of our species - Homo sapiens - and its diversity in Africa, and aims at making new discoveries of early human fossils, archaeological sites and their environmental context.
Image: Ancient pastoralist settlement viewed from the air, Amboseli, Kenya. Photo: P. Lane. Mapping Africa's – Endangered Archaeological Sites and Monuments (maeasam.org) project aims to identify and document endangered archaeological heritage sites across Africa using a combination of remote...
This project sets out to produce a comprehensive, problematised synthesis and interpretation of long-term social and economic dynamics along Mediterranean Africa during the Holocene (9600-700 BC).
Cooperation is a markedly human mix of innate and learned behaviour, and a key to tackling some of our greatest concerns. Paradoxically, studies of social dynamics often focus on hierarchies, state formation and political structures ruled by coercive power, with comparatively little regard to the...
As part of the international campaign to salvage sites threatened by construction of the second Aswan High Dam in southern Egypt, coordinated by UNESCO, researchers from Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland collaborated on a series of archaeological campaigns between 1960 and 1964. Known as the...
The Rising from the Depths Network aims to identify ways in which the marine and maritime cultural heritage of Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique and Madagascar can be used to benefit coastal communities in these countries. Many of these communities are among the poorest in the region and are especially...
Investigating the development of historic environments along the longest river drainage system in Japan.
Cambridge is home to world-leading researchers across archaeological science, technical art history and heritage science, based at Department of Archaeology, the Fitzwilliam Museum, and the Hamilton Kerr Institute, among others. There are multiple synergies across these institutions in terms of...
Traumatic death affects our daily life, but how did traumatic mortality affect human behaviour from an evolutionary perspective? TRAUMOBITA aims to understand how traumatic mortality among prehistoric humans shaped our behaviour during the Late Pleistocene to the Middle Holocene. Confirming that...
The PlaCe network is a high-profile partnership focused on the interdisciplinary study of pre-modern ceramics and plasters. This Innovative Training Network aims at training Early-Stage Researchers to conduct state-of-the-art, science-based research on the technology, use, and provenance of...