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GEOarchaeology of DAily Practices: extracting bronze age lifeways from the domestic stratigraphic record

Project description

Using hard scientific data to reconstruct life during the European Bronze Age

The European Bronze Age (spanning 2500 to 600 BCE) was a time of remarkable change. The EU-funded GEODAP project will take a closer look at daily life during this period in European history. It will focus on practices of daily domestic life. The result will be an innovative narrative of the Bronze Age addressing social, economic and environmental aspects of a culturally interconnected region of Europe. The focus will be on 10 key archaeological sites in 6 European countries, constituting the project’s database. Integrating geoarchaeology (microstratigraphic analysis), organic chemistry (biomarkers), and archaeobotany (phytoliths, seeds, fruits, and charcoal), the project will reconstruct the daily practices from domestic stratigraphy.

Objective

What was daily life like in the European Bronze Age? In contrast to large-scale narratives based on artefacts, often prestige items from funerary contexts, this project focuses on the practices of daily domestic life, recorded in the sediments upon which it took place. These constitute the domestic stratigraphic record. This project, therefore, shifts the scale and the object of archaeological investigation, and aims at bringing interdisciplinary scientific analyses into dialogue with anthropological understandings of lifeways and households. Its main objective is the formulation of an innovative narrative of the Bronze Age addressing social, economic, and environmental aspects of a culturally interconnected region of Europe. The daily practices and life histories of bronze age people will be the pixels of this new picture that challenges previous depersonalized narratives relying on material culture. The region between the Carpatho-Danubian basin, the Balkans, and northern Italy was selected due to its important cultural interactions during the Bronze Age. Ten key archaeological sites in six European countries constitute the project’s database. Its innovative interdisciplinary approach integrates geoarchaeology (micro-stratigraphic analysis), organic chemistry (biomarkers) and archaeo-botany (phytoliths, seeds, fruits, and charcoal) to reconstruct with unprecedented accuracy the daily practices from domestic stratigraphy. This information will be compared with the story told by material culture and integrated with local paleo-environmental records. The project, in fact, challenges also previous reconstructions that called in environmental mega-events (volcanic eruptions, glacial advances, aridity events) to aprioristically explain broad cultural phenomena of the Bronze Age. Their inherent complexity can only be faced by crystallizing detailed micro-histories and site-specific environmental reconstructions into a broader synthesis based on hard scientific data.

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Topic(s)

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Funding Scheme

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ERC-COG - Consolidator Grant

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Call for proposal

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(opens in new window) ERC-2020-COG

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Host institution

UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI DI PADOVA
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 1 862 141,00
Address
VIA 8 FEBBRAIO 2
35122 Padova
Italy

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Region
Nord-Est Veneto Padova
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 1 862 141,00

Beneficiaries (3)

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