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Department of Archaeology

 

Displaying 15 projects

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
EHSCAN is a Horizon-MSCA-2022-PF scheme Fellowship Funded by UKRI and hosted by the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge. The aim is to understand the cultural dynamics and transmission means of material culture in North Africa during the Early Holocene period (~...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...