Research Projects in the Department of Archaeology

The 10th-5th centuries BCE (the first centuries of the Iron Age) witnessed significant societal transformations across the Mediterranean. Populations grew in many regions, the first genuine economic integration of the basin occurred through maritime interaction and overseas settlement, and, for the first time, communities characterisable as urban and state-like are identifiable from the sea’s eastern littoral (where they had a deeper Bronze Age history) through to its Atlantic border.

‘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 century BC, and the Islamic-Christian Ethiopian frontier between the AD 10th and 15th century.

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.

Around 1,200 years ago, archaeological evidence suggests pre-existing pastoralist societies that had been present in some parts of eastern Africa since c. 5,000 BP experience significant cultural and economic change. Materials signs of these include the uptake of iron smelting technologies, new ceramic styles, and changes in food production. In the following centuries, the region also experienced several significant shifts in climate, alternating between periods of increased rainfall and extended droughts.

This project integrates maritime archaeology, history, geophysical survey and anthropology to investigate illicit trade between the Caribbean islands St. Eustatius, Saba, St. Thomas, St. Bartholomew and St. Maarten from 1816 to c.1840 with the aim of understanding:

-The entanglements between international, regional and local factors that drove these islands to engage in illicit trade.

-How these islands functioned together as a network for illicit trade, smuggling and laundering, the processes involved, and how long it occurred.

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 aim of this project will be to investigate the nature and impact of Roman imperialism on the frontiers of North Africa (specifically the Maghreb), especially in considering the role of Roman imperialism on the political economy of the region and its impact on both pre-existing communities and the formation of new communities in the provinces. The notion of frontier is wide-ranging and is inspired by Border Studies, and considers the impact of the frontier in community-formation at both the border and the provincial cores of the Roman Maghreb.

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 Scandinavian Joint Expedition to Nubia, or SJE, this work generated a wealth of data and prompt publication of nine major excavation reports.

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.

Agriculture in Africa faces multiple challenges. Climate extremes, ecosystem degradation and population growth continually prompt calls for the urgent transformation of food systems. Mainstream attempts remain focused on modernising paradigms in ways that overlook historic and contemporary smallholder practice as primary sources of innovation. This project challenges this narrative, adopting an archaeological framework to reconceptualise smallholder innovation as an iterative historic process harnessable as a mechanism for future agricultural design.

This is a pilot project aimed at developing an interdisciplinary approach to research on the legacies of enslavement and emancipation in Senegal, West Africa.