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.

The Archaeology of Cape Verde

At the invitation of a local university and the island's Ministry of Culture's IPC, the CHRC  - Chris Evans & Marie Louise Stig Sørensen - have been investigating its early Portuguese town of Cidade Velha since 2006. Founded in the middle decades of the 15th century, and then for some three centuries the Islands' capital, it became a major hub of the Atlantic Slave Trade, with thousands of Africans transhipped each year to the Americas.

The Late Bronze Age (LBA) and Early Iron Age (EIA) in southwest Asia saw major socio-political transformations, including the rise and fall of the Hittite, Kassite and Neo-Assyrian empires. Alongside socio-political and economic instability, climatically induced droughts are among the most frequently cited causes for the collapse of these states. However, direct evidence for the impact of droughts on agricultural systems is virtually absent from these periods, rendering hypotheses that see climate change at the heart of the crises hypothetical.

Co-production Networks for Community Heritage in Tanzania.

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.

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.

This archaeology-led initiative focuses on the East Anglian Fens, an extraordinary landscape where exceptional preservation of organic artefacts and environmental evidence gives unparalleled insights into the last 5,000 years of communities, resources and habitats.

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.

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).

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).

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.

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

The Must Farm project is the first landscape scale archaeological investigation of deep Fenland, with its complex geological history.

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.

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.

Fordwich has been revealed to be the oldest directly-dated Acheulean occurrence in the United Kingdom, with artefacts dating from 560,000 to 620,000 years ago (MIS 15). This makes it the second oldest Acheulean site in north-west Europe, and the oldest to display a known handaxe assemblage numbering into the hundreds. The site is technologically diverse, with flakes, cores, handaxes, scrapers and retouched implements identified. This makes Fordwich a unique archaeological occurrence in northern Europe.

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.

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.

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 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.