Skip to main content
Go to the home page of the European Commission (opens in new window)
English English
CORDIS - EU research results
CORDIS

Increasingly Anthropogenic Landscapes and the Evolution of Plant-Food Production: Human - Environment Interactions during the Final Pleistocene and Early Holocene in the Levant.

Objective

H-E Interactions will investigate how increasingly anthropogenic wetland landscapes and the reliable resources therein influenced the evolution of plant-food production and the origins of agriculture through the Final Pleistocene into the Early Holocene (ca.23-8 ka cal. BP). It will consider how earlier human-environment interactions shaped this key transition, integrating the latest theoretical Human Niche Construction (HNC) perspectives with environmental archaeology to investigate 5 well-excavated wetland oriented archaeological sites in the S. Levant. It will employ an interdisciplinary, combination of microbotanical approaches, (phytolith, starch and microcharcoal analyses) and geoarchaeology, in particular micromorphology, to investigate the on- and off-site contexts of a temporally broad set of sites to provide long-term, direct evidence of ancient plant-use. To achieve this, training in geoarchaeology, GIS and multivariate statistical skills will facilitate the production, management and interpretation of the large environmental dataset. As well as providing direct evidence of plant-use and environment from a critical H-E threshold, H-E Interactions is the first study in the region to directly examine how HNC practices impacted the origins of agriculture. So far, the origin of agriculture has been largely understood as a consequence of human reactions to environmental push & pull factors. This project presents an alternative approach and takes the view that increased use of ‘low-ranked’ resources may reflect deliberate human modification, management and/or food processing innovation, increasing the relative abundance and ease of acquisition of ‘low-ranked’ resources, resulting in ‘upward mobility’ of that resource. HNC provides a new way to consider changing plant resource selection in the Levant and the wider cultural and environmental implications, which may have impacted the rise of increasingly sedentary lifestyles and the origins of agriculture.

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.

You need to log in or register to use this function

Programme(s)

Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.

Topic(s)

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.

MSCA-IF-EF-ST - Standard EF

See all projects funded under this funding scheme

Call for proposal

Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.

(opens in new window) H2020-MSCA-IF-2016

See all projects funded under this call

Coordinator

THE CHANCELLOR MASTERS AND SCHOLARS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
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.

€ 195 454,80
Address
TRINITY LANE THE OLD SCHOOLS
CB2 1TN CAMBRIDGE
United Kingdom

See on map

Region
East of England East Anglia Cambridgeshire CC
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
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.

€ 195 454,80
My booklet 0 0