Research Projects in the Department of Archaeology

A multi-disciplinary research project focusing on St. John's Hospital cemetery, Cambridge, with an aim to learn more about the lives of the medieval urban poor during the bubonic plague epidemic known as the Black Death.

The above photo shows: A left lateral aspect of a cranium from Catignano (a Middle Neolithic village in Abruzzo), showing two healing trepanations on the left parietal bone and healed fracture on the left frontal and parietal bones of a 40-50 year old female

Understanding the diversity of human cognitive traits in different cultural contexts and in an evolutionary framework is crucial for advancing actual human mind but also its disorders. Attention and executive control including traits such as inhibition, impulsivity, and hyperactivity, are studied in WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic) societies, where sustained focus and impulse control are highly valued. A deficit in these domains might lead to a diagnosis of a mental disorder such as ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder).

A multidisciplinary project investigating the interrelations between crop plants, insect pollinators, and human management in prehistory.

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.

Study of the sustainability and subsequent radical change amongst the Maltese Temple Building populations of prehistoric Malta in the 4th and 3rd millennia BC.

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 bones when reconstructing movement, but to look at the full body to begin to tell the story of our ancestors’ movement. Muscles animate our body, permitting us to walk, run and even dance. We must reconstruct the muscles of the body to understand ancestral locomotion.

LHEAAPS aims to reconstruct the past adaptive strategies of East African pastoralists, and their relative resilience to environmental shocks under different systems of land management, rangeland access, and population and livestock densities across Kenya. The research is designed to generate knowledge that has applied value geared toward enhancing the socio-ecological and cultural resilience and sustainable livelihood strategies of contemporary pastoral societies in the face of current global challenges.

The project has four main research questions:

MendTheGap - Smart Integration of Genetics with Sciences of the Past in Croatia.

As the world's remaining hunting and gathering societies interact more actively with their settled agricultural neighbours, they face major changes in their diet, mobility and community networks. The 5-year MOBILE project is studying the impact of these changes on the health and biological diversity of traditionally hunter-gatherer communities in Indonesia, in order to better understand human experience and evolution in tropical forest environments.

The Must Farm project is the first landscape scale archaeological investigation of deep Fenland, with its complex geological history.

Our understanding of the origins of our species, Homo sapiens, has undergone a major shift. New fossils, dates and genomic studies have consolidated our African origin. Yet, they also indicate a deeper past, involving multiple events. These events stretch to nearly three quarters of a million years ago (Ma), and take the problem of modern human origins into an entirely different climatic and ecological context.

Human evolution is a central research area in biology and anthropology and has a history of research going back more than 150 years. For most of that time, evidence has come from digging up fossils and archaeological remains. Research in human evolution has been transformed by the impact of genomics and the development of ancient DNA methodologies, producing new insights into past demography, dispersal and admixture patterns, social behaviour, selection, disease history, and more.

How did the biomechanics and ergonomics of the human hand influence the use and production of Palaeolithic stone tools? Traditionally, stone tools have been analyzed for their morphological properties and technological characteristics to infer the cognitive and social evolution of early hominins and modern humans. However, the role of musculoskeletal aspects in the effective use of these tools has been largely overlooked, resulting in an incomplete understanding of Palaeolithic technologies.

This project is a response to calls to build long-term sustainability and resilience into pastoral social-ecological systems in sub-Saharan Africa through provision of deep histories of human-environment interactions. It focuses on collecting and analysing archaeological and related data on the responses of pastoralist communities inhabiting the Laikipia and Leroghi plateaus, northern Kenya, to cycles of extreme drought and enhanced rainfall over the last millennium.

The project Science @ Tarquinia aims to provide the complementary scientific support for the long-standing study of the ancient Etruscan city of Tarquinia by the University of Milan. This Unesco World Heritage site is well known for its magnificent painted tombs, its city walls, the Temple of Ara Regina and the monumental zone where the University of Milan has worked for over 30 years. The collaborative work (which started in September 2019) includes flotation, micromorphology, AMS dating, isotopic analysis and aDNA.

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 research methodologies, goals and ambitions in the field of technical and scientific investigation of works of art and archaeological objects.

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 ceramics and plaster, integrating archaeological materials science with biomolecular archaeology. The geographic focus is the Eastern Mediterranean, but we are hoping to push methodological developments of significance in other regions.

The transition from Oldowan to Acheulean technologies are hypothesised to be concomitant with advances in cognition and behaviour. However, the nature of these shifts, and their cultural and evolutionary implications are poorly defined and understood. While extensive literature exists on these technologies, significant differences in research methods and traditions make comparative and comprehensive analyses problematic.