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Department of Archaeology

 

Displaying 14 projects

The archaeology of Sub-Saharan Africa is rapidly gaining momentum, thanks to renewed efforts to decolonise and empower indigenous narratives of agency and creativity that have been bolstered further by the increasing application of scientific methods. However, important challenges remain. One is...
The aim of the ERC project Beasts to Craft (B2C) is to document the biological and craft records in parchment in order to reveal the entangled histories of improvement and parchment production in Europe from 500-1900 AD.
Archaeological investigation of the history of Cape Verde.
Research into global connections, which formed the basis for the spread of objects, ideas, innovations, religions and empires, continues to fundamentally shape our understanding of the development of contemporary society. While the historiography of global connections is dominated by a European...
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...
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...
A rescue excavation of Kilise Tepe in the valley of the River Göksu, providing insight into the history of the Hittite, Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian empires.
A new archaeological project at the ancient city of Lagash in south Iraq (modern Tell al-Hiba) began in March-April of 2019. LAP is a collaboration between the University of Cambridge, University of Pennsylvania (USA) and Iraq State Board of Antiquities and Heritage.
This project analyses early Near Eastern materials and inscriptions holistically in the study of the commemoration of the individual from the Early Dynastic period through the first millennium BCE.
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...
The investigation of urban growth and administration in northern Mesopotamia in the 4th and 3rd millennia BC (north-east Syria).
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...
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...
This project will challenge the extant model on the beginning and spread of Islamic glazes, which asserts that they were all derived from the Middle East and spread with Arab expansion, and that new technologies were adopted passively by conquered societies. It will include a variety of glazed ware types dating to the 9th to 13th centuries CE from different regions of Central Asia.