Research Projects in the Department of Archaeology

Image: Pastoralist rock art, Serengeti, Tanzania. Photo: P. Lane.

The project will develop an innovative new model to examine the pivotal role of anthropogenic wetlands in the long transition to agriculture in the Levant. Remarkably, while this transition has been explored in some detail, we still do not have a good grasp on the long-term developments and causes of the origins of agriculture, mainly due to a lack of direct botanical evidence.

‘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.

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

This project, funded by the McDonald Institute and the Society of Antiquaries, aims to survey of a WWI POW camp in Jersey in collaboration with the University of Liverpool and Bristol.

This research employs archaeobotanical and biomolecular methods to reconstruct ancient agropastoral change over the first millennium CE in two microregions, the Aravah valley along the southern border of modern Israel-Jordan and the adjacent Negev Highlands. The region witnessed unprecedented agricultural developments during this period, alongside major socio-political, climatic, and environmental changes – including climate change and plague. Rich and well-preserved organic remains from rubbish dumps at nine archaeological sites will provide the basis for this study.

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 communities live and maintain ancestral connections to the site. The most outstanding material remains are stone structures, built without use of mortar or any binding material.

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 extremely high diversity suggests that these were ecologically more versatile than traditionally thought.

The aim of H-E Interactions is to investigate how increasingly anthropogenic wetland landscapes, and the reliable resources within those environments, influenced the evolution of plant-food production and the origins of agriculture through the Final Pleistocene and into the Early Holocene (ca. 23-8 ka cal. BP).

Northern Bosnia is a key location in which to investigate human-environment interactions in the Late Pleistocene /Middle-Upper Palaeolithic. Our research aims to evaluate hominan resource networks and investigate palaeoenvironmental conditions during this period, and address the following:

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).

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

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.

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 vulnerable to the impacts of geopolitical turmoil and environmental change.

Igbo-Ukwu is a famous archaeological site in southeastern Nigeria. Excavated by Professor Thurstan Shaw in the 1960s, the site was settled over a thousand years ago. The materials from the site were unlike anything yet found in West Africa at the time. This discovery brought to our consciousness that Igbo-Ukwu represented a prosperous society that had established a complex social structure by the 9th century CE and had significantly interacted with the wider world through interregional and intercontinental exchange and trade.

What does a river do? As anyone who has lived by one knows, rivers structure human worlds in many ways. This project explores the role of Europe’s greatest river in the formation of new societies, in and after the last centuries of the Roman Empire in the West (150–700 AD). The Danube occupied a complex place in the late Roman Empire. Its banks were home for thousands of people. It formed the Empire’s boundary for much of its existence. It was the major axis of communication across central Europe, facilitating the movement of people, things and ideas.

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

Water availability, management and use are crucial factors when it comes to maintaining modern populations in the arid and semi-arid environments that dominate much of India. Today, large parts of India are intensively farmed, and the large-scale mono-cropping of water intensive crops like winter (wheat) and summer (rice) crops is causing extreme water depletion. In combination, these factors are creating an acute risk to food security in the most populated country on the planet.

An international and interdisciplinary investigation of the interplay and dynamics of winter and summer rainfall systems and human adaptation to the ecological conditions created by those systems.

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 development of towns.

Geoarchaeological surveys and analyses are developing new multi-scalar sampling strategies for mapping and tracing land, water and building material resources for settlement, and their uses within houses.

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 for settlement and urban growth? To address these questions, new landscape historical ecology research is exploring resource nexus at Aksum and Great Zimbabwe.

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 of pastoralist biocultural heritage. Community identities and understandings of the landscape are entwined with knowledge – sometimes contested – about water sources, and particularly about the wells dug across the region by earlier generations.

The Assyrian Empire was the first multinational empire in the ancient near east. By the seventh century BC it had grown to cover all of Iraq, Syria and the Levant, substantial portions of western Iran and south-eastern Turkey and even, for brief periods, Egypt. In the site of Ziyaret Tepe we have had a unique opportunity to explore and document Assyrian rule across the whole of this time span. The site lies on the river Tigris, some 60 km east of Diyarbakir in southeastern Turkey.