Migration projects
Research projects in progress on aspects of human migration, mobility, transport, trade and related topics in Western Eurasia include:
Europe or world wide
- AMIS: Laboratory of Molecular Anthropology and imaging Synthesis: This combined effort by the Universities of Toulouse and Strasbourg, France, focuses on the evolution and history of human settlement. It is engaged in extracting ancient DNA for several specific projects. By 2014 it hopes to have sequenced the complete mitochondrial genome and Y chromosome of a large sample of Holocene individuals.
- Ancient Celtic Place-Names in Europe and Asia Minor: This project, directed by Professor Patrick Sims-Williams at Aberystwyth University, provides detailed evidence of Celtic settlement. An electronic data-base, map and several publications have sprung from it.
- Archaeogenetics at Huddersfield University: A new laboratory is being built for the analysis of ancient DNA under Professor Martin Richards, who aims to establish the history of the dispersal of human populations around the world.
- Australian Centre for Ancient DNA aims to study evolution and environmental change using preserved genetic records in human, animal, plant and sedimentary material. It is the sole research centre for ancient DNA research in the Genographic Project (for which see below).
- BEAN: Bridging the European and Anatolian Neolithic: a Marie Curie initial training network aiming to educate a new generation of researchers that will be able to combine the important aspects of prehistoric archaeology, palaeodemography, population genetics, biostatistics, and next-generation molecular genetics while developing specialized skills in their particular scientific discipline. The broader question of the Neolithisation of Europe will serve as an intellectual framework structuring the research and training opportunities. Research includes analysis of ancient DNA data from about 200 Mesolithic and Neolithic skeletal remains from Turkey, Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary.
- Centre for GeoGenetics, Natural History Museum of Denmark, aims to specialise in using ancient DNA research to address highly-debated scientific topics, such as the early peopling of the Americas, and human migrations into the Arctic northern extremes. Current research includes tracing the origins of Caribbean slaves through aDNA, and investigating the Mesolithic/Neolithic transition in Denmark by aDNA.
- Forging Identities: The
mobility of culture in Bronze Age Europe: a network of universities,
museums and research institutions will explore inter-cultural interaction
in Bronze Age Europe, financed by the European Commission. Among the
related PhD projects are:
- The Identity of the bronze smith: Maikel Kuijpers at Cambridge University aims to investigate whether the age had specialist smiths by looking for signs of arsenic poisoning, such as weakness in the legs and feet. His Masters thesis, Bronze Age Metalworking in the Netherlands (c. 2000-800 BC) is available to read online, or download in pdf format.
- On the co-movement of people, techniques and objects in Bronze Age Europe: Vanessa Guyot will include DNA and isotopic analyses in her study of central Unetician and North-Alpine Danubian groups.
- The Formation of Europe: Prehistoric Population Dynamics and the Roots of Socio-Cultural Diversity (FEPRE). Multi-disciplinary project investigating the spread of the Neolithic in Europe. Participants: Newcastle University, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, University of Leicester, University of Manchester, Universitat de Girona, Jagiellonian University and Institute for the History of Material Culture.
- From the earliest modern humans to the onset of farming: the role of climate, life-style, health, migration and selection in shaping European population history. This project funded by the European Research Council will be led by Dr Ron Pinhasi, University College Cork. It will include ancient DNA technology, chronometric dating, stable isotope analysis and bioarchaeology. Partners include the National History Museum of Romania.
- The Genographic Project by National Geographic, headed by Spencer Wells, aims to collect DNA samples from over 100,000 people worldwide to plot the migrational routes by which the Earth was colonised.
- LeCHE: Lactase Persistence and the Cultural History of Europe: an EU-funded research project focusing on the significance of milk for European prehistory, including the study of ancient DNA and isotopes. Der Spiegel carried an article on their work by Matthias Schulz on 15 October 2010 with the misleading heading How Middle Eastern Milk Drinkers Conquered Europe.
- Migration: NERC Isotope Geosciences Laboratory describes a variety of projects using strontium and oxygen isotopes to detect migration in both humans and animals. One study researched the African origins of slaves on the plantations of colonial Barbados.
- Migration and Identity: The University of Exeter is conducting several interdisciplinary projects on this theme, tackling some politically red-hot issues.
- Neolithic genes: Dr. Eduardo Arroyo Pardo leads a team at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid aiming to compare ancient DNA from Neolithic sites in Turkey, Greece, Italy, France, the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa with the present populations of the same geographic regions to clarify the degree to which farming was carried to Europe by the movement of farmers from the Near East.
- Origin and spread of stock-keeping in the Near East and Europe: A project of The Centre for Past Peoples and their Palaeoenvironments at Durham University.
- The peopling of the European continent: the mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosome perspectives. The project at the Universita degli Studi di Pavia, Italy, is headed by Prof. Antonio Torroni. It is currently investigating mtDNA subclades in the hope of identifying markers of Neolithic arrivals in Europe.
- RESET: Response of Humans to Abrupt Environmental Transitions. This British research consortium brings together experts in human palaeontology, archaeology, oceanography, volcanology and past climate change to investigate how our ancestors coped with rapid changes in climate during the last 80,000 years.
- Studying The Ancient Origin of Cystic Fibrosis: Dr. Philip Farrell of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health is investigating the possibility that carrier status for the F508del allele, the most common cause of CF, conferred some advantage originally, such as protection from heavy metal poisoning. He has already found this allele in DNA from Iron Age skeletons in Austria.
Anatolia and Western Central Asia
- Central Zagros Archaeological Project is investigating Sheikh-e Abad and Jani in west Iran, sites important for the early date of animal domestication there, and their location on the most important route-way through the Zagros mountains, later the Great Khorasan Highway, part of the Silk Road. Roger Matthews, Yaghoub Mohammadifar, Wendy Matthews and Abbass Motarjem report their early findings in Antiquity, vol. 84, no. 323 (March 2010).
- Pathways and highways: routes in Bronze Age Eurasia: The doctoral project of Toby Wilkinson of the University of Sheffield. He aims to identify the precursors of and the prehistoric predictors for long-distance routes such as the Silk Road. His focus is on Eastern Anatolia and Western Central Asia 3000 and 1000 BC.
- Titris Hoyuk aDNA Project: joint US-Turkish exploratory study looking at human ancient DNA from Early Bronze Age burials in south-eastern Turkey. The results were published online before print on 27 October 2010 and have been included in the page collating Ancient Western Eurasian DNA.
British Isles, Baltic and Scandinavia
- Ancient Britain and the Atlantic Zone: a project of the Centre for Advanced Welsh & Celtic Studies, University of Wales, examining the evidence from linguistics, archaeology and genetics for British Celtic origins in the Atlantic Bronze Age rather than the central European Iron Age. A volume was published in July 2010, Celtic from the West: Alternative Perspectives from Archaeology, Genetics, Language and Literature, edited by Professors John T. Koch and Sir Barry Cunliffe, of papers presented at a multidisciplinary conference in December 2008.
- AHOB: Ancient Human Occupation of Britain: investigating ancient humans from Palaeolithic and Mesolithic northern Europe.
- ARGEOPOP: Finnish pre-history reconstructed in the light of archaeological and population data by the University of Helsinki. One of the aims of this project is to extract human DNA from ancient Finnish bone samples.
- The
Beaker isotope project: mobility, migration and diet in the British Early
Bronze Age. A collaboration between the University of Sheffield and the
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany.
Preliminary results were presented at the conference
Is there a British Chalcolithic? People, Place and Polity in the later Third Millenium BC
in April 2008, the papers from which are due to be published in Is There a British Chalcolithic?: People, Place and Polity in the Later 3rd Millennium, Prehistoric Society Research Paper 4, edited by Michael J. Allen, Julie Gardiner and Alison Sheridan (June 2012). The conclusion in summary from study of 250 skeletons that there was a high degree of mobility in the British Bell Beaker Culture, including movement from Ireland to Britain, was presented in the BBC 2 series Digging for Britain, episode 2: Prehistory, broadcast on 26 August 2010. - Beaker material culture and social change in Ireland: PhD research project by Neil Carlin at University College Dublin. A summary of his conclusion that Beaker settlement is widespread in Ireland can be found in Neil Carlin, Some findings from a study of Beaker settlement in Leinster, Proceedings of the Association of Young Irish Archaeologists: Annual Conference 2006, ed. K. Cleary and G. McCarthy (2006), pp. 13-27.
- The British Romany Project: This University of Leicester study is being carried out by Dr Turi King (genetic analysis) and Matt Sears (recruitment and genealogies) in Professor Mark Jobling's lab. It aims to look at the genetic ancestry of the Romany people living in Britain today.
- The Bronze Age Copper Mines of North Wales: searching for genetic evidence of the prehistoric settlement of the British Isles. Study by the University of Sheffield.
- Celtic bones: A bio-cultural analysis of the health and lifestyles of early medieval communities from Western Britain and Ireland, AD 410-900, considering population movement, and the impact that Irish and Scandinavian migrations may have had on the lives of the local inhabitants. This PhD project by Katie Hemer at the University of Sheffield includes isotope analyses. A paper on the results was read at UKAS September 2009.
- Centre for Sami Research at Umea University, Sweden, is conducting studies on the Sami lifestyle and the impact of colonization on them.
- Ethnohistory of Northern Hunter-Gatherers: A team of Aberdeen-based scholars is using the archives of the 1926-7 Soviet Polar Census to develop insights into seasonal mobility, changing subsistence practices, sacred landscape geography and the dispersal of new innovations, including transport reindeer, among boreal forest hunter-fisher-gatherer communities in Northwest Siberia.
- Extraction of copper in Sweden during the Bronze Age? Possibility, myth or reality? A project by the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, challenging the established dogma that throughout the Bronze Age all copper in Scandinavia was imported from central Europe.
- Genes of Gallgoidil: Cross-disciplinary studies at the University of Nottingham of migration of Irish, Hiberno-Norse and other Gaelic-speaking populations in the Viking Age. The project is now closed and concentrating on presenting the conclusions. It has spawned a website for schools in Britain and Ireland: Resource on Viking Age Migration.
- Hjaltland Research Network : planning an inter-disciplinary research project Mapping Viking Age Shetland, which will start in 2013, drawing on folklore onomastics, genetics, isotope research, archaeology and history. Intended as a pilot for a larger scale project MSGI: Migration, Settlement and Genetic Inheritance: Mapping the Legacy of the Viking Age.
- Immigration to England in the later Middle Ages: Professor Mark Ormrod, with Dr Craig Taylor and Dr Nicola McDonald of York University aim to explore immigration to England in the period 1330-1550.
- Indigenous or incomers? A mobility study of people with pre-Columbian venereal syphilis at Hull Magistrates Court: Durham University will use stable isotopic analysis to investigate the origin of early sufferers of VS in Britain, buried at a late Medieval friary (1316-1450 AD).
- The People of the British Isles: An Oxford University project funded by the Wellcome Trust to aid medical research, and shed light on ancient migrations within the British Isles. Sir Walter Bodmer presented a paper on the results in June 2011 to the conference Ancient Britons, Wales, and Europe: New research in Genetics, Archaeology and Linguistics. The first paper for a referred journal concentrated on the research strategy. It was published online on 10 August 2011 ahead of print: Bruce Winney et al., People of the British Isles: preliminary analysis of genotypes and surnames in a UK-control population, European Journal of Human Genetics. A further paper will be presented in October 2011 at the combined ASHG and IFHGS conference in Montreal.
- Pottery use by late foragers and early farmers of the Baltic: the Early Pottery Research Group is making a systematic survey of the contents and use of Ertebolle and TRB pottery from northern Europe.
- Resources, mobility, and cultural identity in Norse Greenland AD 980-1450: a project led by Jette Arneborg, Senior Researcher at the National Museum of Denmark. It includes analysis of the DNA from skeletons found during excavations in south Greenland. Preliminary results indicate that the settlers from Iceland carried more Celtic than Nordic blood. This supports previous studies of Icelandic DNA, and the documentary evidence that the Nordic settlers of Iceland brought Irish and Scottish slaves with them.
- Roots of the British: 1000 BC to AD 1000. This multidisciplinary project at Leicester University aims to reappraise the evidence for the migration and/or continuity of human populations in the British Isles in the distant past, particularly Celtic, Anglo-Saxon and Viking. It has access to the genetic database created by The People of the British Isles project. A £1.37 million grant from the Leverhulme Trust is funding six post-doctoral scholars for five years, starting in January 2011, to work on a related project: The Impact of Diasporas on the Making of Britain: evidence, memories, inventions.
- What's in a name?
Applying patrilineal surnames to forensics, population history and genetic
epidemiology: This project headed by Prof. Mark A. Jobling of Leicester
University and including Prof. Stephen Harding of Nottingham University has
already produced a study of Viking ancestry in Wirral and West Lancs: G.R.
Bowden et al., Excavating
past population structures by surname-based sampling: the genetic legacy of
the Vikings in northwest England, Molecular Biology and
Evolution, vol. 25 (2008), pp. 301-309 and P. Cavill, S.E. Harding
and J. Jesch, Wirral and its Viking Heritage (English Place
Names Society 2000). In 2009 it began a new study of northern England and
in 2010 called for volunteers for DNA testing in
Norway (page in Norwegian). About 400 Norwegian men responded, and received
their results in September 2011. One of the researchers is Turi King,
joint author of several related papers, and of George Redmonds, Turi King
and David Hey, Surnames, DNA, and Family History (September
2011).
Central Europe
- Bell Beaker Metallurgy in Central Europe: PhD project by Matthias Merkl at the University of Edinburgh which aimed to compare Bell Beaker copper artefacts with those of other Late Neolithic and earliest Bronze Age groups to find out if they used the same metallurgical know-how. His conclusions were published in Matthias B. Merkl, Bell Beaker metallurgy and the emergence of Fahlore-copper use in Central Europe, Interdisciplinaria archaeologica: Natural Sciences in Archaeology, vol. 1, nos.1-2 (2010), pp. 19-27.
- Kinship, lineage and phenotype: Genetic composition of Middle Neolithic populations and their relationship to social differentiations. This project led by Dr. Rebecca Renneberg at the Institute of Legal Medicine, University of Kiel, is analysing ancient DNA from about 250 European Neolithic individuals. Among other things, it hopes to shed light on the origin of European diversity in eye-, skin- and hair-colour.
- Kinship and residence patterns in the
Late Copper Age in Southern Germany: a German-British Network Project
which intends to include aDNA and isotope studies.
- Otzi - The Iceman: The latest milestone in the study of the glacier mummy is the complete sequencing of his genome, completed in July 2010. Details will be released at the 2nd Bolzano Mummy Congress: Mummies from the Ice on 20-22 October 2011.
Mediterranean 
- Antikythera Mechanism Research Project: The astronomer Mike Edmunds and the mathematician Tony Freeth (University of Cardiff), the astronomer John Seiradakis (University of Thessalonica), the astronomer Xenophon Moussas and the physicist, Yanis Bitsakis (University of Athens), and philologist and palaeographer Agamemnon Tselikas (National Bank of Greece Cultural Foundation) are reinvestigating the extraordinary mechanism found by sponge divers at the bottom of the sea near the island of Antikythera.
- Material Connections: Mobility, Materiality and Mediterranean Identities: Peter van Dommelen, Bernard Knapp and Michael Rowlands direct this research project of the University of Glasgow, looking at contacts amongst various Mediterranean islands and their nearby shores to explore the social and cultural impact of migratory, colonial and exchange encounters. The results were published in September 2010.
- Pavlopetri Underwater Archaeology Project: an Early Bronze Age submerged port off the southern Laconian coast of Greece is being investigated in a collaborative project between the University of Nottingham and the Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture.
- Portus Project: An investigation of the principal port of imperial Rome, led by the University of Southampton.
- Roman DNA Project: Kristina Killgrove, Lecturer at Vanderbilt University, has boldly reached out to the public to help finance this pilot project to study the DNA from the skeletal remains of lower-class Romans dating to the Imperial period.
Russia
- Baikal Archaeological Project: a multinational and multidisciplinary investigation of hunter-gatherer burials along the shores of Lake Baikal, Siberia, and the rivers that flow into it. This includes the extraction of ancient DNA. Nour Moussa presented a poster at the Eighth International Conference on the Mesolithic in Europe in Santander, Spain, 13-17 September, 2010, on Y-chromosomal polymorphisms in hunter-gatherer populations of Lake Baikal Area, Siberia. The project has already generated numerous publications.
- Ice Age development and Human Settlement in northern Eurasia (ICEHUS) : a Russian-Norwegian co-operation which aims to improve understanding of the Late Quaternary environmental changes at high latitudes and their impact on the earliest human occupation in northern Russia.
South-East Europe
Early Neolithic settlement at Ohoden-Valoga: A project of the Bulgarian Archaeological Association 2002-5, in conjunction with Georgi Ganetovski of the Regional History Museum in Vratsa, who is continuing excavation. DNA from the four skeletons uncovered is to be studied. Already published: G. Ganetsovski, Ohoden: a site from the Early Neolithic, excavations 2002-2006 (2009).
Steppes
- Begash, Kazakhstan: Washington University in St. Louis is looking at the life of Bronze Age pastoralists and their successors. Among the aims is to present evidence for horseback riding on the steppe via the human femurs from Begash, which show the development of unusually strong muscle attachments associated elsewhere with riding. The aims include study of local and regional population history from stable isotope and DNA analysis. The University has also conducted a survey of rock art in Koksu Valley: one common motif is the chariot.
- Botai: Early horse herders on the steppes of Northern Kazakhstan: Dr. Sandra Olsen, Curator of Anthropology at Carnegie Museum of Natural History, describes her joint fieldwork with Drs. Bruce Bradley and Alan Outram of Exeter University (see below).
- Harnessing Horsepower: Horses and Humans in Antiquity: David W. Anthony and Dorcas R. Brown have devised and tested indicators of horse domestication.
- Horse Domestication in the Botai Culture, Eneolithic Kazakhstan: Dr Alan Outram of Exeter University heads an international project to investigate the origins of horse domestication.
- Klin Yar: Andrej Belinskij and Heinrich Harke of the University of Reading probe skeletal evidence for male-only immigration of Sarmatian pastoralists from the northern steppes into the North Caucasus, and the later Sarmatian-Alanic transition. Results published in German as H. Härke and A.B. Belinskij, Klin-Jar: Ritual und Gesellschaft in einem langzeitbelegten Gräberfeld im Nordkaukasus, TÜVA-Mitteilungen (Tübinger Verein zur Förderung der ur- und frühgeschichtlichen Archäologie) vol. 12, (2011), pp. 37-49.
- The
Palaeogenetics Group at the University of Mainz is engaged in several
studies, including:
- Lactase Persistence in Meso- Neolithic Europeans.
- Palaeogenetic analyses of economic innovations and social mobility in the Eurasian Steppe 3500-300 BC. For this DNA has been recovered from 14 Kurgan skeletons of Central-Asian, Sarmatian, origin (400-200 BC). In addition to the summary of progress provided by Dr. Joachim Burger on the University of Mainz website, The Center for the Study of Eurasian Nomads has put online his preliminary report: DNA Results from Pokrovka Warrior Women compared with Meirmgul.
- Topoi: One project within this research cluster is based at Berlin is using strontium isotope research to determine the degree of migration and mobility between the North Pontic and the Carpathian basin in the Eneolithic and Early Bronze Age. A paper on the results (C. Gerling et al, Mobility and diet in the prehistoric western Eurasian steppes in the light of stable isotope analysis) was presented at UKAS September 2009.
