Research Projects in the Department of Archaeology

At the intersection among the arts, science, and technology, printing is widely recognised as the invention of the millennium. However, and in spite of a resurgence of traditional typographic methods among artists and craftspeople, letterpress equipment and technology face an uncertain future.

The above photo shows: A left lateral aspect of a cranium from Catignano (a Middle Neolithic village in Abruzzo), showing two healing trepanations on the left parietal bone and healed fracture on the left frontal and parietal bones of a 40-50 year old female

The archaeology of Sub-Saharan Africa is rapidly gaining momentum, thanks to renewed efforts to decolonise and empower indigenous narratives of agency and creativity that have been bolstered further by the increasing application of scientific methods. However, important challenges remain. One is the scarcity of training and archaeological science capacity in sub-Saharan Africa, which is necessary to make these efforts sustainable.

Analysis and evaluation of bronze axe hoards during the Late Bronze Age - Iron Age transition. The project investigates provenance, chronology, technological and cultural aspects of bronze deposition of the European Atlantic region.

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.

The 10th-5th centuries BCE (the first centuries of the Iron Age) witnessed significant societal transformations across the Mediterranean. Populations grew in many regions, the first genuine economic integration of the basin occurred through maritime interaction and overseas settlement, and, for the first time, communities characterisable as urban and state-like are identifiable from the sea’s eastern littoral (where they had a deeper Bronze Age history) through to its Atlantic border.

‘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.

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.

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.

The project will research how archaeological and palaeoecological narratives of past land management and climate change adaptation can shape sustainable farming, regenerative agriculture, and rewilding strategies in the Cambridgeshire Fenlands. The nationally important agricultural area is extremely vulnerable to climate change, and the mentioned strategies are considered key mitigation options.

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.

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.

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.

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

The Kani Shaie Archaeological Project is a collaboration between the University of Cambridge, the University of Coimbra (Portugal), and the Sulaymaniyah Directorate of Antiquities. Since 2013, the project organises excavations at the site of Kani Shaie near the town of Bazyan in Sulaymaniyah Governorate, Iraqi Kurdistan.

LHEAAPS aims to reconstruct the past adaptive strategies of East African pastoralists, and their relative resilience to environmental shocks under different systems of land management, rangeland access, and population and livestock densities across Kenya. The research is designed to generate knowledge that has applied value geared toward enhancing the socio-ecological and cultural resilience and sustainable livelihood strategies of contemporary pastoral societies in the face of current global challenges.

The project has four main research questions:

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.