Project description
Exploring the concept of 'belonging' in Mycenaean Greece
Since the excavation of the famous shaft graves at Mycenae, archaeologists have tried to understand the social structures evident in the burial of several individuals within the same grave. The EU-funded MySocialBeIng project will produce and integrate comprehensive archaeological, anthropological, genetic and isotopic analyses for all individuals buried together in selected collective graves in an effort to decipher the criteria for their selection and social belonging out of the dialectic interplay of biological relatedness and social practices. The project's results will shed light on the concept of social belonging in the human past.
Objective
"Since Heinrich Schliemann excavated the famous shaft graves at Mycenae and identified the individuals as members of Agamemnon’s royal family, archaeologists have tried to understand the social structures which materialised in the collective graves of Mycenaean Greece. Whereas today’s understanding of family ties goes well beyond biological relatedness (e.g. patchwork families), prehistoric individuals buried together and their belonging are still predominantly explained by biological models – also due to the inability to trace past biological relatedness. But now the necessary methods have been developed and we will apply them to the extraordinary archaeological richness of Mycenaean Greece with its many collective graves which will serve as a paradigmatic case study for unravelling prehistoric social complexity beyond elites. MySocialBeIng will produce and integrate comprehensive archaeological, anthropological, genetic and isotopic analyses for all individuals buried together in selected collective graves (chamber, tholos) in order to decipher the criteria for their selection and social belonging out of the dialectic interplay of biological relatedness and social practices (gender, mobility, nutrition, burial, material culture). This has only recently become possible with 1) the development of bioinformatics tools to model biological relationships, 2) single-stranded DNA library production for numerous individuals, 3) innovative pedigree-based Bayesian modelling of 14C dates and 4) novel datasets of bioavailable strontium in Greece. The results will have a major impact on Mycenaean archaeology and on archaeology as a discipline by establishing a ground-breaking new approach to the study of past social relations. Moreover they will be relevant for the social sciences in general as well as for society, allowing us to fully understand the complexity of social belonging in the human past and thus helping to overcome the 19th-century “biological bias"" of belonging."
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- natural sciences chemical sciences inorganic chemistry alkaline earth metals
- medical and health sciences health sciences nutrition
- humanities history and archaeology archaeology
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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H2020-EU.1.1. - EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)
MAIN PROGRAMME
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
ERC-COG - Consolidator Grant
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Call for proposal
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2020-COG
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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.
80539 MUNCHEN
Germany
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.