Project description
A Bronze Age look at Europe’s busiest shipping route
The English Channel – the world’s busiest seaway – is a body of water that separates southern England from northern France. Stretching 560 km in length, over 500 ships pass through the channel every day. The EU-funded WATCH project is taking a closer look at the English Channel’s past maritime connections – going all the way back to the early Bronze Age. Combining archaeology with methods and data from geography and environmental sciences, this interdisciplinary study aims to understand how communities living in the Channel coastlands became interdependent at a time when trade in tin and copper was strengthening the foundations for an extensive prehistoric European union.
Objective
The aim of the WATCH project is to model the organisation of territories, economic and political connections, and social hierarchies promoted and sustained by maritime connections across and around the English Channel during the early Bronze Age (EBA). This study is crucial to understand how communities living in the Channel coastlands became interdependent at a time when trade in tin and copper was strenghtening the foundations for an extensive prehistoric European union. Central to the project is the study of burials within their human, social, and natural environments using Geographical Information System (GIS) analysis. The project is interdisciplinary, rooted in archaeology but borrowing concepts, methods, and data from geography and environmental sciences. This project will enable the fellow to achieve the research and transferable skills, which will allow him to become a mature independent researcher and international expert of the EBA northwestern Europe. The fellow will be able to apply the most up-to-date GIS skillset to different problems in the field of prehistoric archaeology, which will extend an exciting research career. This project offers the opportunity to the fellow to conduct innovative research and transnational mobility while providing benefits for the European Research Area, the Bournemouth University, the supervisor, the partner organisation and the fellow. This project will allow the fellow to develop a research agenda that will lead to a range of research and consultancy projects with European academic and non-academic institutions for the better understanding of EBA societies and cross-Channel relationships, thus enhancing research excellence and addressing recognized research questions in Europe, and beyond. Finally, the fellow aims to offer civil society the demonstration of how and why both sides of the Channel became socially and economically interdependent in the past is relevant to considering the future of our societies.
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: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesphysical geographycartographygeographic information systems
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesenvironmental sciences
- natural scienceschemical sciencesinorganic chemistrypost-transition metals
- humanitieshistory and archaeologyarchaeology
- social sciencespolitical sciencespolitical policiescivil society
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Keywords
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinator
BH12 5BB Poole
United Kingdom