Research Projects in the Department of Archaeology

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

Co-production Networks for Community Heritage in Tanzania.

EHSCAN is a Horizon-MSCA-2022-PF scheme Fellowship Funded by UKRI and hosted by the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge. 

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.

In Western Europe the main use for artificial monuments out of stone, wood or earthy materials extends from the Late Neolithic to Early Bronze Age (4th and 3rd millennium BCE).  This unique period of landscape adaptation has a lasting, visible imprint on the present. However, as monuments are by definition visual landmarks, there is currently a lack of research regarding the perceptive clues offered by these structures to the people who built and frequented them.

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 heritage, and hence for developing better strategies for its protection and management.

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.

The Mapping Africa’s Endangered Archaeological Sites and Monuments (MAEASaM) project, funded by Arcadia charitable foundation, is documenting and compiling a trans-national inventory of Africa’s rich archaeological heritage, including many previously unidentified sites and monuments. Particular emphasis is being given to mapping and recording sites under threat, whether from urban growth, conflict, sea-level change or infrastructure development, among other adverse impacts.

Cooperation is a markedly human mix of innate and learned behaviour, and a key to tackling some of our greatest concerns. Paradoxically, studies of social dynamics often focus on hierarchies, state formation and political structures ruled by coercive power, with comparatively little regard to the mechanisms whereby humans voluntarily collaborate. Encouragingly, new research on collective action is reconciling classic anthropology with game theory and empirical studies of group resource management, thus heralding a fundamental transformation.

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.

Investigating the development of historic environments along the longest river drainage system in Japan.

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 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.