ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

Compelling evidence is now emerging that tropical environments were cradles of innovation and complexity from prehistory to the present. Tropical forests in particular have long been considered marginal and inhospitable, but recent work suggests that several critical milestones were achieved in these landscapes. Vast expanses were terraformed by increasingly complex societies, often in a quest to mitigate the sharp seasonality of the monsoon. Ostensibly wild and pristine rainforests are now characterised as managed 'gardens'. The giant low-density settlement complexes of 'rainforest civilisations' anticipate the sprawling megacities of our contemporary world, and offer a laboratory for understanding the profound challenges that they create. To date, these emerging perspectives have largely been driven by advances in palaeobotany, archaeogenetics, isotopic analyses, and contemporary rainforest ecology. Remote sensing has so far played only a modest role in this broader agenda, in spite of the unique capability of lidar technology to 'strip away' vegetation and reveal archives of human activity inscribed in the Earth's surface. This program will tackle the core problems that currently constrain the 'lidar revolution' in archaeology: We will use a new generation of lidar technologies to greatly expand coverage in Southeast Asia, home to many of the most important and understudied rainforest landscapes. We will develop open access frameworks and infrastructures for aggregating, sharing and collaborating on new and existing lidar datasets. We will build on recent advances in artificial intelligence to develop generic models for automation and analysis, in order to move beyond localised, culturally-specific lidar applications. The net result of this work will be to create consistent, comparable datasets of human impacts on the Earth's surface, with a view to understanding trajectories of innovation and complexity in the tropical world from the deep past to the present.

2 748 285 €

Start date: 2020-10-01, End date: 2025-09-30

Large-scale genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have yielded thousands of genetic as-sociations to heritable traits, but for most common diseases, these signals collectively explain only a small fraction of phenotypic variation. The phenotypic impact of recent, rare genetic variants, in particular, is poorly understood, but currently available data sets and analytical tools cannot be used to effectively study this class of variation. To address this problem, we propose to develop new computational methodology that will enable studying the phenotypic role of recent, rare genetic variation. This will improve our understanding of the architecture of heritable complex traits, inform the design of future studies, and increase our ability to detect novel associations. This project will address three specific aims. The first aim is to devise new methods to accurately reconstruct the complex network of genealogical relationships of individuals using high/low-coverage sequencing or microarray data. The second is to leverage these genealogical structures to infer the presence of unobserved genetic variation, with the goal of analyzing variance components of narrow sense heritability attributable to rare variants and studying the evolutionary history of heritable traits. Finally, in the third aim, we will develop new approaches to detect association to both rare and common variants, increasing the statistical power of GWAS methodology.

1 499 665 €

Start date: 2020-01-01, End date: 2024-12-31

ArmEn seeks to establish a new framework for studying the southern Caucasus, eastern Anatolia and northern Mesopotamia (CAM) as a space of cultural entanglements between the 9th to 14th centuries. It argues that this region is key to understanding the history of medieval Eurasia but has so far been completely neglected by the burgeoning field of Global Middle Ages. The CAM was on the crossroads of expanding Eurasian empires and population movements, but was removed from major hubs of power. Poly-centrism; political, ethno-linguistic, and religious heterogeneity; frequently shifting hegemonic hierarchies were key aspects of its, nevertheless, inter-connected landscape. This fluidity and complexity left its mark on the cultural products – textual and material – created in the CAM. ArmEn aims to trace shared features in the multi-lingual textual and artistic production of CAM and correlate them to the circulation of ideas and concepts, as well as to real-life interactions, between multiple groups, identifying the locations and agents of entanglements. The large but under-utilised body of Armenian sources to be explored together with those in Arabic, Georgian, Greek, Persian, Syriac, and Turkish, will illuminate cultural entanglements between Muslim and Christian Arabs, Byzantines, Syriac Christians, Georgians, Caucasian Albanians, Turko-Muslim dynasties, Kurds, Iranians, Western Europeans, and Mongols, that inhabited, conquered, or passed through and produced cultural goods in CAM. Evidence from manuscript illuminations and numismatics will provide a material cultural dimension to the analysis. ArmEn will create a trans-cultural vision of the CAM, bridging area studies into a unifying framework, bringing together various disciplinary approaches (philology, literary criticism, religious studies, art history, numismatics, etc.), to build a narrative synthesis in which the dynamics of cross-cultural entanglements in the CAM emerge in their spatial and temporal dimensions.

1 999 994 €

Start date: 2020-10-01, End date: 2025-09-30

Concise, massively ideological texts have long been perceived as constitutive of the development and transformation of opinion and policy in the public sphere. At least since the early Enlightenment, the pamphlet has been at the forefront of major philosophical, social, and political transformations, including processes of democratization and dedemocratization, colonization and decolonization, the universalization of civil and civic rights, the enforcement of political or territorial autonomy, and the critique of labor exploitation. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, pamphleteering has reemerged as a vital transformative and polemical force in liberal Western societies, prompting often polarized discussions of contentious issues. By integrating philological, historical, and politological research perspectives, ArtsAutonomy will produce a first systematic, large-scale account of contemporary pamphleteering and shed new light on the perceived ongoing radicalization of political, cultural, and social ideals and discourses in contemporary Europe and the United States. We intend to achieve our epistemic goals by studying “pamphletary events”, i.e. events which unfold in the public sphere and which engage both a pamphletary text and interpretative competences widely distributed among the general reading public. ArtsAutonomy will produce several thematically organized case studies of pamphletary events, including analytic “slices” of evolving public opinion on pamphletary statements, as recorded in transcripts of public deliberations, open letters, online commentary, user and consumer feedback, and social media. Our multidisciplinary approach will provide a unique insight into the concrete current political agency of one of the oldest literary forms, as well as into the philological-interpretative competences upon which pamphletary events and their normalization are predicated.

1 229 665 €

Start date: 2020-03-01, End date: 2025-02-28