Project description
Understanding human interaction with birds
Birds play a vital role in our ecosystem and contribute to our well-being. While our connection with birds traces back to prehistoric times, the adaptation of avifauna to climate shifts and human activities has resulted in a complex archaeological record. In this context, the ERC-funded AviArch project seeks to investigate the transition to agriculture in Epipalaeolithic/Neolithic southwest Asia and the emergence of urban life and trade routes in Bronze Age Crete. Using novel techniques, the project will analyse the diversity of birds in past human systems and examine human-avian relationships in archaeology. By doing so, the project will shed light on how environmental changes impact both humans and birds. AviArch holds the promise of enhancing human adaptability and informing avian conservation strategies.
Objective
We love birds but probably do not worry enough about our relationship to them. Across the world, we are threatening their critical ecosystem functions, including birds positive impact on our wellbeing, and poultry has become our favourite meat, yet industrial-scale breeding has consequences for human and bird health. Arguably, this lack of concern is due to our ignorance of the deep historical roots of these relationships. Our interaction with birds, for their plumage, eggs, meat, song, or spirit, extends back to prehistory. At the same time, avifauna responded to climate shifts, and to our modifications of the landscape. This has created a tangled archaeological record, which makes understanding bird-human relationships all but impossible.
Building upon and moving beyond my expertise in biomolecular archaeology, AviArch will explore, from a birds eye view, the transition to agriculture in Epipalaeolithic/Neolithic southwest Asia and the emergence of urban life and trade routes in Bronze Age Crete. AviArch will reveal the variety of birds in past human systems by using new techniques for the identification of avifauna, integrating zooarchaeology, palaeoproteomics and AI. My sites have been carefully chosen to target biodiversity hotspots with a rich archaeological record intersecting socio-ecological changes of human-bird relationships. We will combine ecological, morphological, and behavioural traits for each bird, to produce the most refined exploration of human-avian relationships yet attempted in archaeology. Using network analysis and underpinned by multispecies theory, AviArchs archaeoecological models will discover how environmental shifts affected people, and anthropogenic- and climate-driven changes affected birds.
By transforming the ways in which past bird-human interactions are studied, AviArch promises to improve human adaptivity, avian conservation strategies, and make us worry and marvel about these beautiful creatures a little more.
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.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- humanitieshistory and archaeologyhistoryprehistory
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesecologyecosystems
- agricultural sciencesagriculture, forestry, and fisheriesagriculture
- humanitieshistory and archaeologyarchaeologybioarchaeology
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Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
10124 Torino
Italy