This ERC Starting Grant aims to shed light on changes in mobility, migration patterns and landscape use of early populations in Europe by bringing together information obtained directly from both cremated and inhumed individuals using state-of-the art bioarchaeology. The aim is to identify and characterise the movement of people on a local, regional and European scale to explain how and why people moved, as well as how they used their surrounding landscape between the Neolithic to the Early Medieval period, when both cremation and inhumation were practised.
Movement represents a key feature of an individual’s life both now and in the past. How and why people moved in the past can be documented by biogeochemical studies on bone and teeth, and these are at the core of this project. However, in many cases, due to different funerary practices (i.e. cremation and inhumation), the type of archaeological skeletal elements available and their state of preservation is very variable. Characterizing mobility in times where both cremation and inhumation were practiced is challenging for three main reasons: (1) important amounts of information are destroyed during cremation with temperatures reaching up to 1000°C, (2) the bioarchaeological information obtained from unburned and burned human remains often represent different times in their life (e.g. youth/adolescence vs adulthood), and (3) the limited adequate baselines available prevent the refined contextualisation and interpretations of the results in many parts of Europe.
This project will yield important new insights into the nature and extent of mobility and migration across Europe from the Neolithic through to the Early Medieval Period and show how past mobility forged the Europe of today.
