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Displaying 32 projects
Image: Pastoralist rock art, Serengeti, Tanzania. Photo: P. Lane. The Adaptation and Resilience to Climate Change (ARCC) project focuses on documenting the parameters leading to socio-ecological resilience in the borderlands area of Kenya and Tanzania, with specific reference to the Serengeti Basin...
This project aims to study the crucibles and finished metal objects recently recovered from the Great Zimbabwe World Heritage site, using techniques from earth and materials sciences.
‘BODIES MATTER’ focuses on the material culture of bodies (and the self) in colonial borderlands by comparing three frontiers at various periods and geographies: the Spanish Empire’s southern borderland in the Americas in the AD 16th-19th century, the Punic western Mediterranean in the 6th-2nd...
Co-production Networks for Community Heritage in Tanzania.
Archaeological investigation of the history of Cape Verde.
Coastal Origins: Earliest human occupation of the shoreline
The Community Heritage and Education for Sustainable Development in Tanzania project is a continuation of some of the activities initiated by the AHRC-funded Co-production Networks for Community Heritage in Tanzania (CONCH) project ( https://www.conchproject.org/ ), that ran in 2018 and 2019. This...
This project is documenting the knowledge, skills, and practices of traditional dry-stone masonry at Great Zimbabwe, southern Zimbabwe. Once the capital of an Iron Age empire, Great Zimbabwe is an ancient settlement complex with dry-stone structures covering over 720 hectares. Around it, local...
Tracking the early emergence of derived Homo -like cerebral features in the hominin fossil record can be expected to contribute to an understanding of the timing (i.e., chronology) and mode (i.e., process) of critical brain changes. Because brain tissue is not preserved in the fossil record...
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...
Geoarchaeological research on Bantu landscapes is being carried out as part of the interdisciplinary Bantu Mobility Project. This project is exploring Bantu expansions in the Kafue floodplain of central Zambia. By combining archaeological survey and excavation, spatial analysis, historical...
HEAAT aims to develop a multidisciplinary, theory-focused and data-driven research framework and agenda for East African historical archaeology that will privilege the research of the internal dynamics of African communities and account for the region’s history of complex identities. By...
Long-distance exchange networks played key roles in the socio-political history of Central Africa before the 20th century, but they are poorly known prior to the 19th century owing to a scarcity of written sources covering the earlier centuries. Archaeological data, however, suggest that major 19th...
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.
Despite recent progress in molecular analyses and the constant increase of the hominin remains in the fossil record, the chronological, geographical and evolutionary context of the emergence of the genus Homo remains largely debated. More importantly, the identity of our direct ancestors and...
Children experiencing food insecurity, repeated infections and psychosocial stress have compromised development, and increased risk for non-communicable diseases in adulthood. While public health interventions have had limited benefits, addressing this is critical, both from a public health...
Image: Ancient pastoralist settlement viewed from the air, Amboseli, Kenya. Photo: P. Lane. The 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...
MedAfrica Project - Archaeological deep history and dynamics of Mediterranean Africa, ca.9600-700 BC
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).
The project focuses on the models of circulation of raw materials during the Iberian Late Prehistory, as well as the use and social value given to the different materials, with special attention to metals and amber.
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...
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...
In the last decade we have learned that (at least) three human species existed across the African continent during the Pleistocene. After the paleoanthropological and archaeological discoveries and dating of Jebel Irhoud (Morocco), we know that Homo sapiens was present at around 300ka with a clear...
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...
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...
This is a pilot project aimed at developing an interdisciplinary approach to research on the legacies of enslavement and emancipation in Senegal, West Africa. The project is situated within the context of renewed archaeological engagements with local communities and paralell changes in...
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...
This project is examining resource landscapes and urban transition on Zanzibar during two major periods of urban growth. Fieldwork at Unguja Ukuu (7th–15th centuries) and Tumbatu (11th–15th centuries) on Zanzibar is exploring domestic contexts and investigating resource uses supporting the...
This project brings together several research streams to examine the nexus relations between land and water resources, societal development, and landscape stability in sub-Saharan Africa. What processes and practices support long-term settlement and resource use? How did past societies secure water...
This is a collaborative research project between archaeologists and pastoralist community organisations on the long-term history of indigenous water management and well digging in northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia. In these arid and semi-arid parts of eastern Africa, wells form a key component...
As the complex mosaic of Quaternary human lineages across and beyond Africa becomes increasingly apparent, an accurate chronology is critical to disentangle the patterns and process, particularly those that link human evolution to palaeoenvironmental and climatic change. “Wisdom Teeth” is a NERC-...
This project aims to improve the poor integration of localized data linking various WASH dimensions (infrastructure, access, practices) and children nutritional status at the population level as well as the poor involvement of policy makers concerned with WASH in local and country level nutritional...
