Project description
Secrets of human history of the post-Bronze Age Eastern Baltic area
Comprehensive understanding of the human past in the Eastern Baltic area requires well-coordinated cooperation between various disciplines and excellent analytical competence. Acknowledging this, the EU-funded ECHO project is consolidating expertise from archaeologists, geneticists and anthropologists across Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and is teaming up with advanced centres from Belgium and Denmark to untangle the intricacies of human evolution and cultural dynamics in the region. Cutting-edge tools and management techniques will drive this interdisciplinary endeavour, shedding light on overlooked regional developments in the post-Bronze Age period. Through ECHO’s collaborative network, Eastern Baltic research will gain prominence on the global stage, enriching our understanding of the origins of human diversity.
Objective
ECHO consolidates the existing academic excellence and creates new synergies in the Eastern Baltics by bringing together humanitarian scholars (archaeologists, historians), natural scientists (geneticists, bioinformaticians) and experts from the intersection of those disciplines (anthropologists) from the region to enhance and promote research in the human past within the interdisciplinary framework. The motivation of the ECHO is to understand the processes behind the current diversity of peoples and cultures, the role and mutual interaction of demographic developments and environmental changes in those processes, and to share this knowledge with society.
The ECHO's pan-Eastern Baltic network of archaeogenomic research will link the resources of the three Baltic countries – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – to conduct internationally competitive research on the human past. Within ECHO, the knowledge of state-of-the-art analytical tools and interdisciplinary project and data management skills, transferred from advanced EU partners, will be tested for addressing timely questions about the human past, with the focus on currently understudied local evolutionary developments during the post-Bronze Age period in the Eastern Baltic region.
The synergistic science conducted within ECHO will help to increase the visibility of the research done in the Eastern Baltic region on the human past at both European and global scales and to contribute to the common knowledge about the processes that have shaped the present diversity of human populations in the Eastern Baltic region, in the spatiotemporal context of Europe.
ECHO will contribute to sustainable interdisciplinary research on archaeogenomics in the Eastern Baltics, supported by the consolidated network of regional research centres, enhanced concepts and enriched methodology.
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-CSA - HORIZON Coordination and Support ActionsCoordinator
51005 Tartu
Estonia