Bronze age rock art illustration of a characteristic Bronze Age ship with crew in a ceremonial position, raising their paddles, a lur blower and a raised man with an axe, from Tanum, western Sweden.
understanding of migrations and their wider effects. “We know that migrations led to some major changes in European prehistory. Farming was introduced into Europe by migrants who started in Anatolia, then moved into the Balkans,” outlines Kristian Kristiansen, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Gothenburg, one of the project’s Principal Investigators. The migrants halted for a long period south of the Baltic Sea and farming practices did not spread more widely until later on, an example of the kind of topics that can now be probed in greater depth. “Were crops not yet robust enough to go further North? Was the climate conducive?”continues Professor Kristiansen. “Other migrations have had a marked influence on the DNA profile of all Europeans. How did these migrations unfold?”
Early Bronze Age vessel deposit from the site Kakucs-Turján, Hungary. (Photo: Robert Staniuk)
COREX project
New perspectives on ancient migrations The team behind the ERC-backed COREX project are building a relational database that allows researchers to analyse correlations between data. This will help researchers gain new insights into the events during prehistory that helped shape the genetic and cultural diversity of modern Europe, as Professor Kristian Kristiansen and Professor Stephen Shennan explain. Many
different sources of evidence can now be harnessed to investigate the past, including not just written materials and archaeological remains, but increasingly ancient DNA (aDNA), strontium samples and other types of data. Over the last decade or so sophisticated new techniques have been developed to analyse aDNA, opening up new insights into migratory patterns during prehistory, which have surprised many archaeologists. “Recently uncovered aDNA evidence shows that during prehistory people moved around Europe on a far wider scale than had previously been thought,” says Stephen Shennan, Professor of Theoretical Archaeology at University College London (UCL). As part of the team behind the ERCbacked COREX project, Professor Shennan is now working to link this new aDNA information about migratory patterns with other forms of evidence, and investigate the causes and effects of past population shifts. “We are exploring whether migrations were caused by factors like climate change, and the effects these migrations may have had on material culture,” outlines Professor Shennan. 50
The current distribution of archaeological sites with information in the BIAD database.
There has historically been a tendency in research to attribute these migratory shifts to a single cause, for example a change in the local climate, yet it is now thought that
other factors may also have been involved. The project brings together researchers from several different disciplines, mobilising all the available knowledge to build a fuller
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Researchers are seeking out periods in prehistory where major changes took place, with the aim of looking at the underlying factors behind them. This research is focused on the period between 6,000 BCE up to around 500 BCE, with Professor Kristiansen and his colleagues taking samples of what is called environmental DNA (eDNA) from sites across Europe. “We have been sampling sites dating from the Neolithic period to the Iron Age. We take samples from sites like historical garbage pits, then analyse the soil for DNA evidence. We can potentially get a timeslice of the DNA that was in the air when that garbage pit was used. This could be pathogens, or animal or plant DNA. We are learning more about the conditions under which DNA is best preserved,” he says. This data will be brought together in a relational database called BIAD (Big Interdisciplinary Archaeological Database). “We’ve collated a lot of data from a wide variety of sites, in particular we have large amounts of C14 (carbon-dating) evidence,” says Professor Shennan. “We’re also going to link the BIAD database to pollen data from the European Neotoma pollen database.” The data is linked to the site from which it was sampled, providing a firm basis for the project team to tackle six main research questions, covering different topics around the social, economic and cultural changes that have helped shape modern Europe. Researchers can look at the periods when certain new practices were adopted in Europe, and investigate the wider circumstances at the time. “We can investigate the time around the
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beginning of agriculture or metallurgy for example, then look into our data and see whether we can see any correlations with changes in land use or diet,” outlines Professor Kristiansen. Once researchers have got a sense of whether there are any
correlations between different datasets, they can then apply new types of modelling to test hypotheses around historical events, for example about how migrations may have occurred. “What was going on in terms of the mixture between the incoming
The types of data in the BIAD database and the current number of entries in each category.
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