Project acronym CoDisEASe
Project Communicable Disease in the Age of Seafaring
Researcher (PI) Kirsten BOS
Host Institution (HI) MAX-PLANCK-GESELLSCHAFT ZUR FORDERUNG DER WISSENSCHAFTEN EV
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH6, ERC-2018-STG
Summary Infectious diseases have had an intimate history with humans and have shaped our genetic makeup through generating strong selective pressures. Although disease emergence and epidemics occur on a local scale, human interrelationships formed through travel and trade can lead to exchanges of pathogenic communities. While such transfers were common among the interconnected Eurasian and North African cultures throughout most of human history, the rest of the world experienced relative ecological autonomy. The terminal Pleistocene witnessed the colonisation of vast territory on the American continents, after which interactions between New and Old World peoples were limited for millennia by geographical barriers. These ecological worlds collided at the end of the fifteenth century, when improvements in navigation and the discovery of the Americas by Europeans permitted regular contact and plentiful opportunities for biological interchange. The identities of most diseases that played leading roles during this period of exchange are known, though details on the directions of their movement and temporal introductions remain the subject of scholarly debate. The work programme presented here will use an underexplored data source – ancient pathogen genomes – to identify infectious insults in pre- and post-contact New and Old World skeletal series, thus enabling an evaluation of changing disease landscapes at contact. Complementary to this goal, genomic loci for human immunity genes will be interrogated, thus permitting quantitative evaluations of disease adaptation. Ancient molecular data will be acquired through use of the most sensitive and up to date methods in the field of ancient DNA with the aim of bringing diseases not easily seen from skeletal morphology or historical documents to light in clear detail. This will permit an unprecedented resolution of past disease experience and host-pathogen interactions during this dynamic period of global ecological unification.
Summary
Infectious diseases have had an intimate history with humans and have shaped our genetic makeup through generating strong selective pressures. Although disease emergence and epidemics occur on a local scale, human interrelationships formed through travel and trade can lead to exchanges of pathogenic communities. While such transfers were common among the interconnected Eurasian and North African cultures throughout most of human history, the rest of the world experienced relative ecological autonomy. The terminal Pleistocene witnessed the colonisation of vast territory on the American continents, after which interactions between New and Old World peoples were limited for millennia by geographical barriers. These ecological worlds collided at the end of the fifteenth century, when improvements in navigation and the discovery of the Americas by Europeans permitted regular contact and plentiful opportunities for biological interchange. The identities of most diseases that played leading roles during this period of exchange are known, though details on the directions of their movement and temporal introductions remain the subject of scholarly debate. The work programme presented here will use an underexplored data source – ancient pathogen genomes – to identify infectious insults in pre- and post-contact New and Old World skeletal series, thus enabling an evaluation of changing disease landscapes at contact. Complementary to this goal, genomic loci for human immunity genes will be interrogated, thus permitting quantitative evaluations of disease adaptation. Ancient molecular data will be acquired through use of the most sensitive and up to date methods in the field of ancient DNA with the aim of bringing diseases not easily seen from skeletal morphology or historical documents to light in clear detail. This will permit an unprecedented resolution of past disease experience and host-pathogen interactions during this dynamic period of global ecological unification.
Max ERC Funding
1 490 043 €
Duration
Start date: 2018-12-01, End date: 2023-11-30
Project acronym DAIRYCULTURES
Project Cultures of dairying: gene-culture-microbiome evolution and the ancient invention of dairy foods
Researcher (PI) Christina Gertrude WARINNER
Host Institution (HI) MAX-PLANCK-GESELLSCHAFT ZUR FORDERUNG DER WISSENSCHAFTEN EV
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH6, ERC-2018-STG
Summary Summary: Dairy products are nutritional resources of global economic importance, and their emergence in prehistory marks a major shift in human dietary ecology. However, basic questions regarding the origins and role of dairying in early human societies remain poorly understood. It is now known that adult hypolactasia (the inability to digest milk sugar) is an ancestral human trait, and that relatively few human populations have genetic variants that allow continued milk digestion into adulthood, a trait known as lactase persistence (LP). The rise of LP has been regarded as a classic example of gene-culture evolution; however, the association between LP and lactose intolerance phenotypes is variable, and LP genotypes do not consistently appear in the archaeological record until more than 5,000 years after the origins of dairying. This has left archaeologists with a puzzling problem, a “milk paradox” regarding how and why ancient peoples developed milk into a dietary resource, how the Bronze Age steppe migrations contributed to the spread of dairying across Eurasia, and what other factors besides LP may have been involved this process. There is now a growing body of evidence that microbes have played important, yet overlooked, roles in the successful establishment of prehistoric dairying economies. This study seeks to answer fundamental questions about the prehistory of dairying by focusing on Mongolia, a country where as much as 80% of the rural diet derives from dairy products, and where dairying has been practiced for more than 3,500 years. Specifically, cutting-edge genomics techniques will be used to identify the origins of Mongolian dairy livestock, proteomics techniques will be used to refine methods for detecting milk proteins in archaeological Mongolian dental calculus, and metagenomics techniques will be used to test hypotheses regarding the relationship between the gut microbiome, lactose digestion, and LP genotypes in nomadic Mongolian dairy herders.
Summary
Summary: Dairy products are nutritional resources of global economic importance, and their emergence in prehistory marks a major shift in human dietary ecology. However, basic questions regarding the origins and role of dairying in early human societies remain poorly understood. It is now known that adult hypolactasia (the inability to digest milk sugar) is an ancestral human trait, and that relatively few human populations have genetic variants that allow continued milk digestion into adulthood, a trait known as lactase persistence (LP). The rise of LP has been regarded as a classic example of gene-culture evolution; however, the association between LP and lactose intolerance phenotypes is variable, and LP genotypes do not consistently appear in the archaeological record until more than 5,000 years after the origins of dairying. This has left archaeologists with a puzzling problem, a “milk paradox” regarding how and why ancient peoples developed milk into a dietary resource, how the Bronze Age steppe migrations contributed to the spread of dairying across Eurasia, and what other factors besides LP may have been involved this process. There is now a growing body of evidence that microbes have played important, yet overlooked, roles in the successful establishment of prehistoric dairying economies. This study seeks to answer fundamental questions about the prehistory of dairying by focusing on Mongolia, a country where as much as 80% of the rural diet derives from dairy products, and where dairying has been practiced for more than 3,500 years. Specifically, cutting-edge genomics techniques will be used to identify the origins of Mongolian dairy livestock, proteomics techniques will be used to refine methods for detecting milk proteins in archaeological Mongolian dental calculus, and metagenomics techniques will be used to test hypotheses regarding the relationship between the gut microbiome, lactose digestion, and LP genotypes in nomadic Mongolian dairy herders.
Max ERC Funding
1 499 988 €
Duration
Start date: 2018-11-01, End date: 2023-10-31
Project acronym DOS
Project Domestic Servants in Colonial South Asia
Researcher (PI) Nitin Sinha
Host Institution (HI) GEISTESWISSENSCHAFTLICHE ZENTREN BERLIN EV
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH6, ERC-2014-STG
Summary Title: Domestic Servants in Colonial South Asia
The ubiquity of domestic servants in contemporary South Asia has received scarce attention from historians. Servant pasts have been used instrumentally to write others’ histories. In contrast, this project centrally situates servants at the intersection of households, labour and forms of relationships. Everyday relationships between servants and masters were based upon labour and wage on the one hand and intimacy and affect on the other.
The paradox of pervasive visibility of servants and their marginality in history writing is explicable once theoretical templates are laid bare. To achieve that, the project raises three key questions: 1) How did servant labour unsettle the often rigid and easy categorisation of work into ‘productive’, ‘reproductive’ and ‘unproductive’? 2) How did the multiplicity of relational axes forged around male-male, male-female and female-female affects and hierarchies question the standard accounts framed by assumptions of heterosexual interactions? 3) How did the hierarchies of social and shared worlds marked by race, class, caste, religion, rank, profession and age shape the legal, juridical and criminal bases of labour regulation?
Servant histories need to move beyond the employer’s household into the realm of ghettoes, streets, bazaars, barracks, hospitals and mission houses. Two research units involving the PI and a co-applicant cover two periods of colonial history: one, the period from the early eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth; and second, from the mid-nineteenth to the twentieth century.
By locating servants in the wider social, political, and moral world, the project combines empirically grounded case studies with the political economy of imperialism. It aims to develop a new understanding of labour, gender and social history, each of these in turn being rewritten, even as they lay the foundations of the first historically grounded account of domestic work in South Asia.
Summary
Title: Domestic Servants in Colonial South Asia
The ubiquity of domestic servants in contemporary South Asia has received scarce attention from historians. Servant pasts have been used instrumentally to write others’ histories. In contrast, this project centrally situates servants at the intersection of households, labour and forms of relationships. Everyday relationships between servants and masters were based upon labour and wage on the one hand and intimacy and affect on the other.
The paradox of pervasive visibility of servants and their marginality in history writing is explicable once theoretical templates are laid bare. To achieve that, the project raises three key questions: 1) How did servant labour unsettle the often rigid and easy categorisation of work into ‘productive’, ‘reproductive’ and ‘unproductive’? 2) How did the multiplicity of relational axes forged around male-male, male-female and female-female affects and hierarchies question the standard accounts framed by assumptions of heterosexual interactions? 3) How did the hierarchies of social and shared worlds marked by race, class, caste, religion, rank, profession and age shape the legal, juridical and criminal bases of labour regulation?
Servant histories need to move beyond the employer’s household into the realm of ghettoes, streets, bazaars, barracks, hospitals and mission houses. Two research units involving the PI and a co-applicant cover two periods of colonial history: one, the period from the early eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth; and second, from the mid-nineteenth to the twentieth century.
By locating servants in the wider social, political, and moral world, the project combines empirically grounded case studies with the political economy of imperialism. It aims to develop a new understanding of labour, gender and social history, each of these in turn being rewritten, even as they lay the foundations of the first historically grounded account of domestic work in South Asia.
Max ERC Funding
899 849 €
Duration
Start date: 2015-10-01, End date: 2018-09-30
Project acronym DUNES
Project Sea, Sand and People. An Environmental History of Coastal Dunes
Researcher (PI) Joana FREITAS
Host Institution (HI) Faculdade de letras da Universidade de Lisboa
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH6, ERC-2018-STG
Summary Dunes are now protected environments, being top priority for coastal managers, because of their important role as coastal defences. But, it was not like that in the past.
For centuries dunes were considered unproductive and dangerous. The sand blown by the wind was taken inland, invading fields, silting rivers and destroying villages. In the eighteenth century, a strategy was developed to fight against the dunes: trapping them with trees, with the double purpose of preventing the destruction of arable land and increasing their economic value converting them into forest areas. Different governments, in different countries supported the immobilization of the shifting sands. The strategy, developed in Europe, was taken to other places in the world. These works caused profound changes in vast coastal areas transforming arid landscapes of sandy dunes into green tree forests.
This project aims to explore human-environment relations in coastal areas worldwide, since the eighteenth century until today, through the study of dunes as hybrid landscapes. Based on selected case-studies and comparative approaches, the project will focus on the origins, reasons and means of dunes afforestation; the impacts of the creation of new landscapes to local communities and ecosystems; and the present situation of dunes as coastal defences and rehabilitated environments. The final purpose is to produce an innovative global history of coastal dunes, combining knowledges from both Humanities and Social Sciences and Physical and Life Sciences, which has never been done.
Supported by an interdisciplinary team, this research will result in new developments in the field of the Environmental History studies; provide relevant knowledge considering the need of efficient management solutions to adapt to the expected mean sea level rise; and stimulate environmental citizenship by disseminating the idea that the future of the world coasts depends on today’s actions.
Summary
Dunes are now protected environments, being top priority for coastal managers, because of their important role as coastal defences. But, it was not like that in the past.
For centuries dunes were considered unproductive and dangerous. The sand blown by the wind was taken inland, invading fields, silting rivers and destroying villages. In the eighteenth century, a strategy was developed to fight against the dunes: trapping them with trees, with the double purpose of preventing the destruction of arable land and increasing their economic value converting them into forest areas. Different governments, in different countries supported the immobilization of the shifting sands. The strategy, developed in Europe, was taken to other places in the world. These works caused profound changes in vast coastal areas transforming arid landscapes of sandy dunes into green tree forests.
This project aims to explore human-environment relations in coastal areas worldwide, since the eighteenth century until today, through the study of dunes as hybrid landscapes. Based on selected case-studies and comparative approaches, the project will focus on the origins, reasons and means of dunes afforestation; the impacts of the creation of new landscapes to local communities and ecosystems; and the present situation of dunes as coastal defences and rehabilitated environments. The final purpose is to produce an innovative global history of coastal dunes, combining knowledges from both Humanities and Social Sciences and Physical and Life Sciences, which has never been done.
Supported by an interdisciplinary team, this research will result in new developments in the field of the Environmental History studies; provide relevant knowledge considering the need of efficient management solutions to adapt to the expected mean sea level rise; and stimulate environmental citizenship by disseminating the idea that the future of the world coasts depends on today’s actions.
Max ERC Funding
1 062 330 €
Duration
Start date: 2018-11-01, End date: 2023-10-31
Project acronym ELEPHANTINE
Project Localizing 4000 Years of Cultural History. Texts and Scripts from Elephantine Island in Egypt
Researcher (PI) Verena Lepper
Host Institution (HI) STIFTUNG PREUSSISCHER KULTURBESITZ
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH6, ERC-2014-STG
Summary The aim of this project is to write a cultural history of 4000 years, localized on Elephantine Island in Egypt.
Elephantine was a militarily and strategically very important island in the river Nile on the southern border
of Egypt. No other settlement in Egypt is so well attested over such a long period of time. Its inhabitants
form a multi-ethnic, multicultural and multi-religious community that left us vast amounts of written sources
detailing their everyday lives from the Old Kingdom to beyond the Arab Conquest. Today, several thousand
papyri and other manuscripts from Elephantine are scattered in more than 60 institutions across Europe and
beyond. Their texts are written in different languages and scripts, including Hieroglyphs, Hieratic, Demotic,
Aramaic, Greek, Coptic and Arabic. 80% of these manuscripts are still unpublished and unstudied. The great
challenge of this project is to use this material to answer three key questions covering:
1) Multiculturalism and identity between assimilation and segregation,
2) Organization of family and society,
3) Development of religions (Polytheism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam).
Thus, access needs to be gained to these texts, making them publicly available in an open access online
database. Links are to be identified between papyrus fragments from different collections and an
international ‘papyrus puzzle’ will be undertaken, incorporating cutting-edge methods from digital
humanities, physics and mathematics (e.g. for the virtual unfolding of papyri). Using this database with
medical, religious, legal, administrative, even literary texts, the micro-history of the everyday life of the local
and global (i.e. ‘glocal’) community of Elephantine will be studied within its socio-cultural setting in Egypt
and beyond. It will be linked back to macro-historical questions and benefit from newly-introduced
methodologies of global history: Elephantine can thus be used as a case study and a model for the past,
present and future.
Summary
The aim of this project is to write a cultural history of 4000 years, localized on Elephantine Island in Egypt.
Elephantine was a militarily and strategically very important island in the river Nile on the southern border
of Egypt. No other settlement in Egypt is so well attested over such a long period of time. Its inhabitants
form a multi-ethnic, multicultural and multi-religious community that left us vast amounts of written sources
detailing their everyday lives from the Old Kingdom to beyond the Arab Conquest. Today, several thousand
papyri and other manuscripts from Elephantine are scattered in more than 60 institutions across Europe and
beyond. Their texts are written in different languages and scripts, including Hieroglyphs, Hieratic, Demotic,
Aramaic, Greek, Coptic and Arabic. 80% of these manuscripts are still unpublished and unstudied. The great
challenge of this project is to use this material to answer three key questions covering:
1) Multiculturalism and identity between assimilation and segregation,
2) Organization of family and society,
3) Development of religions (Polytheism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam).
Thus, access needs to be gained to these texts, making them publicly available in an open access online
database. Links are to be identified between papyrus fragments from different collections and an
international ‘papyrus puzzle’ will be undertaken, incorporating cutting-edge methods from digital
humanities, physics and mathematics (e.g. for the virtual unfolding of papyri). Using this database with
medical, religious, legal, administrative, even literary texts, the micro-history of the everyday life of the local
and global (i.e. ‘glocal’) community of Elephantine will be studied within its socio-cultural setting in Egypt
and beyond. It will be linked back to macro-historical questions and benefit from newly-introduced
methodologies of global history: Elephantine can thus be used as a case study and a model for the past,
present and future.
Max ERC Funding
1 500 000 €
Duration
Start date: 2015-07-01, End date: 2021-06-30
