Research Projects in the Department of Archaeology

The aim of the ERC project Beasts to Craft (B2C) is to document the biological and craft records in parchment in order to reveal the entangled histories of improvement and parchment production in Europe from 500-1900 AD.

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.

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.

The Promised project forms a network of excellence in Bioarchaeology and Archaeological Materials Science within the Science and Technology in Archaeology and Culture Research Center (STARC) at the Cyprus Institute linked with the advanced research centres in Archaeological Science at KU Leuven and the University of Cambridge.

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.

SILKGLASS is a Horizon Europe MSCA-PF fellowship funded by UKRI and hosted by the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge.

PersianTRAIL is a research project using Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Remote Sensing (RS), and historical-archaeological data to reconstruct the Persian Royal Road (PRR), a key infrastructure of the Achaemenid Empire (6th–4th century BCE). The project examines factors like topography, resource distribution, economy, military logistics, and environmental constraints to understand the empire’s strategic planning.