ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

The BIRTH project will investigate the key biological and cultural mechanisms affecting fertility rates resulting the Neolithic Demogaphic Transition, the major demographic shift in human evolution. We integrate skeletal markers with micro-nutritional and macro-scaled cultural effects on fertility rates during the Early-Middle Holocene (10000-5000 BC) in the Central Balkans. Human, animal and plant remains, will be analysed using methods from bioarchaeological, forensic, chemical sciences in order to: 1) Investigate variability in the pattern of birth rates (number of pregnancies, interval(s) between them and the duration of the reproductive period) through histological analysis of irregularities in tooth cementum of women; 2) Determine paleoobstetric and neonatal body characteristics, health status and nutrition through analysis of skeletal remains; 3) Determine micronutritional changes during the Early-Middle Holocene through trace element (Zn, Ca and Fe) analysis; 4) Investigate the micro and macronutritional value of prehistoric foodstuffs, through an analysis of animal and plant remains and to compare the nutritional intake in relation to health and fertility; 5) Establish a chronology of the NDT in the Balkans by summed radiocarbon probability distributions; 6) Explore the possible role of culture in driving fertility increases, through analysis of community attitudes to birthing trough investigation of neonate graves and artifact connected to the birthing process. Given that the issues of health and fertility are of utmost importance in the present as they were in the past, the BIRTH project offers new understanding of biocultural mechanisms which led to fertility increase and novel approaches to ancient skeletal heritage, and emphasizes their great potential for modern humanity.

1 714 880 €

Start date: 2015-10-01, End date: 2020-09-30

This project is about the racialization of migrant labourers across political boundaries, with a main focus on impoverished Europeans who served in huge numbers as indentured labourers in nineteenth-century Guianese, Caribbean and Hawaiian sugar plantations and in the workforce of late nineteenth and early twentieth century New England cotton mills. With this project I aim to provide major, innovative contributions on three fronts: (i) theory-making, by working the concepts of race, racism, racialization, embodiment and memory in association with migrant work across political boundaries and imperial classifications; (ii) social relevance of basic research, by linking an issue of pressing urgency in contemporary Europe to substantive, broad-scope, and multi-sited anthropological/historical research on the wider structures of domination, rather than to targeted problem-solving research of immediate applicability; (iii) disciplinary scope, by proposing to unsettle historical anthropology and ethnographic history from within the boundaries of a single empire, and to overcome the limitations of existing comparative studies, by inquiring into the flows and interactions between competing empires. I will also: (iv) strengthen the methodology for multi-sited, multi-period research in anthropology; (v) contribute to an anthropology of global connections and trans-local approaches; (vi) promote the multidisciplinary and combined-methods approach to complex subjects; (vii) narrate a poorly known set of historical situations of labour racializations involving Europeans and document the ways they reverberate through generations; and (viii) make the analysis available to both academic audiences and the different communities involved in the research.

2 161 397 €

Start date: 2016-09-01, End date: 2021-08-31

Colonial-Liberation Wars generate plural memories, conflicting evocations and persisting amnesias. The project’s main challenge is to produce innovative knowledge about the memories of the wars fought by the Portuguese state and pro-independence African movements between 1961 and 1974/5. The approach chosen is simultaneously diachronic and comparative, inasmuch as it contrasts changes that took place between the end of the conflicts and nowadays, regarding how wars, colonial pasts and anticolonial legacies have been remembered and silenced in Portugal, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde and São Tomé and Principe. The key hypothesis is that wars - as pivotal moments that ended the cycle of Empire in Portugal and started the cycle of African independences in the former Portuguese colonies - triggered memorialisation and silencing processes which had their own historicity. CROME is divided into two strands. The first one, named ‘Colonial Wars, Postcolonial States’, looks at the role played by the states under consideration in mobilising, articulating and recognising the past, but also in actively generating selective representations. ‘Memory as a battlefield’ is the second strand, which will highlight distinct uses of the past and dynamics between social memories and individual memories. The project intends to demonstrate how wars gave rise to multiple memories and conflicting historical judgements, mostly in Portugal, but also to examine how the specific nature of the (post-)colonial histories of each African country has generated different ways to summon war memories and (anti-)colonial legacies. CROME will, thus, put forward a ground-breaking perspective in terms of colonial-liberation war studies, and will be instrumental in dealing with such traumatic experience, for its comparative approach might help overcoming everlasting constraints still at play today, caused by the historical burden European colonialism left behind.

1 478 249 €

Start date: 2017-02-01, End date: 2022-01-31

Of all the technical and scientific developments that made possible the early modern maritime expansion, the nautical chart is perhaps the least studied and understood. This fact is very surprising as it was through those charts that the newly discovered world was first shown to the amazed eyes of the European nations. Although the History of Cartography is a well-established academic discipline and old charts have been examined for many years, their detailed technical study is still in its infancy. What is the origin of the pre-Mercator nautical chart, how charts evolved technically over time and how they were used at sea are all critical questions that remain to be answered. I intend to approach these challenges in a truly interdisciplinary way, by using innovative and powerful tools as a complement to the traditional methods of historical research: analytical cartometric methods, numerical modelling and the examination of the manuscripts through special lighting. By applying these tools to a large sample of charts of various periods and origins, I aim to unveil hidden graphic content related to their construction and use, to characterize their main geometric features, to establish meaningful connections with contemporary navigational methods and exploration missions, and to numerically simulate their construction by taking into account the explanations given in the textual sources. The effectiveness of those techniques has already been demonstrated in my previous studies, such as in the solution of an historical enigma which had been alive for more than a century: the construction of the Mercator projection, in 1569. Now, I propose to handle a broader and more complex set of questions, which has eluded the historians of cartography for even a longer period. The clarification of these issues will have a ground-breaking impact, not only in the strict field of the History of Cartography, but also in the context of the intellectual history at large.

1 231 319 €

Start date: 2017-06-01, End date: 2022-05-31

Empirical evidence for the history of the exploitation of the timber resource in Northern Europe is stored in the material record. Archaeological finds, art-historical objects and built heritage have provided us with an extensive dataset of precisely dated wood from heritage contexts. This material is the key to details about the usage, condition and availability of the timber resource and details of trade in timber, including the maritime timber trade, from c. AD 1100 to 1700. Tree-ring studies provide not only the precise felling date for the trees used, but also allow the identification of the tree’s region of origin. However, there are gaps in the material evidence, and other analysis techniques will be explored to supply answers where the tree-ring evidence falls short. Through study of archival material (such as merchant-books and letters, customs rolls, legal and administrative records), along with targeted analysis of historical timber, the history and dendro-archaeology will be combined to study resource availability, ownership, logistics, economics, market mechanisms and politics of trade in timber as a bulk building material. Using both tried and trusted methods that I have refined, incorporating a holistic approach, and developing a range of innovative new procedures including my recent break-through in non-invasive analysis methods, key archaeological structures will be examined. These key constructions are spread throughout the period under examination and each represent a different piece of the timber resource and timber trade puzzle, either temporally or geographically. These specific cases will make it possible for me to investigate specific, but contrasting questions on the regionality, chronology and geography of the maritime timber trade in Northern Europe, over a period of six centuries. Combining the material and historic records and applying a range of analysis techniques this project will transform our understanding of the past timber trade.

1 472 199 €

Start date: 2016-09-01, End date: 2021-08-31