Research Projects in the Department of Archaeology

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 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.

The Mapping Archaeological Heritage in South Asia (MAHSA) project, now in its Phase 2, will continue to document the endangered archaeology and cultural heritage of the Indus River Basin and the surrounding areas and publish this information in an Open Access Arches geospatial database. Over the course of Phase 2, the project will expand its scope to include the Ganges River Basin, Baluchistan and the coastal areas of India and Pakistan.

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 transition from Oldowan to Acheulean technologies are hypothesised to be concomitant with advances in cognition and behaviour. However, the nature of these shifts, and their cultural and evolutionary implications are poorly defined and understood. While extensive literature exists on these technologies, significant differences in research methods and traditions make comparative and comprehensive analyses problematic.