Professor Helena Hamerow among Oxford academics awarded ERC Synergy Grants to address complex scientific problems
Professor Helena Hamerow. Photo credit: John Cairns
Professor Helena Hamerow (School of Archaeology and Faculty of History) has been named among four academics at the University of Oxford to co-lead ambitious new research projects backed by European Research Council (ERC) Synergy Grants, part of the EU’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme. Synergy Grants foster interdisciplinary and international collaboration between outstanding researchers, enabling them to combine their expertise, knowledge, and resources to push the boundaries of scientific discovery.
The Professor of Early Medieval Archaeology will be one of four Principal Investigators leading a project called MEMELAND (Molecular Ecology of Medieval European Landscapes). This will investigate the impact of the agricultural transformation that took place during the Middle Ages on northern Europe’s landscapes and biodiversity. The team will analyse sedimentary DNA found at the bottom of lakes, which can preserve traces of human activity and reveal how the vegetation and animals present around the lake changed over time. The results will be used together with archaeological remains to examine the impact on biodiversity and land use of the spread of the mouldboard plough and crop rotation, the introduction of new plant and animal species, epidemics, and climate change.
Professor Hamerow said: ‘MEMELAND will transform our understanding of the impact of medieval farming by revealing plants and animals that are normally invisible in the archaeological record. It will allow us to situate excavated remains from medieval settlements within a wider eco-system, something I couldn’t have imagined doing even a few years ago’.
MEMELAND involves a collaboration between the University of Oxford; The Arctic University, Tromsø (the coordinating institution); Paris Lodron Universität, Salzburg; the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, Zurich; and Charles University, Prague.
The other recipients from the University of Oxford are:
- Professor Francis Brown (Mathematical Institute)
- Professor Aditi Lahiri (Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics)
- Professor Elena Seiradake (Department of Biochemistry and Kavli Institute for NanoScience Discovery)
