Research Projects in the Department of Archaeology

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

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.

Focusing on cultural heritage, the project is exploring awareness of the archaeology of the ancient Egyptian city of Tell el-Amarna alongside local relationships with the site.

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.

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.

Archaeological data is often biased and incomplete. This is a well-known issue for most archaeologists. Although studies of specific sites and small regions can have this into account, the effect of this problem increases exponentially as archaeologists expand their chronological and geographic frame, and try to answer questions related to general dynamics and broad human processes.

The bioarchaeological characterization of disabled individuals from the past is particularly challenging because it pushes the boundaries of the interpretation of pathologies recognisable on human remains. With my project, namely B-CARED, I will investigate the bioarchaeological approaches for recreating “Past to life”. In so doing, the osteobiographical approach offers a possible framework, in which human remains are used to understand not only the embodied experience during life but also seeing people as playing diverse social roles (e.g.

‘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.

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 aimed to identify how heritage protection, conservation and interpretation contribute to sustainable development.

Co-production Networks for Community Heritage in Tanzania.

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.

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, studies of hominin brain evolution focus on brain endocasts (i.e., replicas of the inner table of the bony braincase).

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.

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 investigating a 200-year, high-resolution record of material culture and identity change among the Ilchamus community in Kenya, from c.

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.

A large-scale multi-disciplinary study of pre-Roman iron technology in the Iberian Peninsula.

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 assessment of the adaptations characterizing our genus remain unclear.

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:

Excavations at the settlement adjoining the prehistoric sanctuary on Keros in the Cycladic Islands of Greece, the earliest maritime sanctuary in the world (2750-2240BC).

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.

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 perspective and for the Sustainable Developmental Goals. We therefore seek to test the proposition that a life history theory perspective will inform interventions in both maternal and child health, thereby enhancing their effectiveness.

This website provides a platform for learning about the Egyptian archaeological site of Amarna, known anciently as Akhetaten with a focus on educational resources for children and schools around the world on life at Amarna in the past and present.

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.

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. 

This project aims to gain a better understanding of the relationship of Crete with the world outside the island through the lens of a key body of materials: goldwork.

The project seeks to examine the economic and social relationships of ancient Egyptian tomb owners. Drawing upon both textual and archaeological sources, in particular the interplay between them, the project will analyse new quantifiable economic data from private rock-cut tombs during the New Kingdom (c. 1550-1069 BCE) in order to determine the economic impact these funerary monuments had on society. Utilising ‘Social Network Analysis’ the project will qualify the flow of resources that was invested in the building of the tombs.

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 seeks to develop a theoretical and practical understanding of the relationship between reparations, responsibility and victimhood in transitional societies.

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.

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 9^th to 13^th centuries CE from different regions of Central Asia.

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 how we died had an enormous influence on our ancestors and represents an enormous change in how we understand human societies.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This project analyzes the historiography of the Yangshao Culture and its functioning as a heritage icon for the Chinese nation as well as its impact on various societal concerns.

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.