Ex-SPACE · Exploring Social Permeability in Ancient Communities of Europe
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2016-09-26 → 2018-09-25
- EU contribution
- €183,455
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-ST
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Results in brief
Exploring Social Permeability in Ancient Communities of Europe
Ex-SPACE project has focussed on the permeability of the ancient societies of the Bronze Age to accept and integrate non-local individuals in the local groups, and consequently, on how the eventual integration of newcomers influenced the socio-political process that brought village communities to a more articulated and hierarchical system based on urban centres. This task is addressed through an extensive series of biogeochemical analyses on human bones and teeth (using strontium, oxygen and carbon isotopes) that allow to determine if an individual was born in the same place where he/she died or, conversely, moved from another place. The relationship between indigenous people and immigrants at the dawn of European civilization is central in the current debate on migration and human mobility. The analyses have targeted four Bronze Age archaeological sites located in Northern Italy, an area that has always represented a buffer-zone between Continental Europe and the Mediterranean, notably characterized by different socio-political systems. Mobility patterns have been explored for four key-sites, spanning the Early to Late Bronze Age (1900-900 BC), namely Sant’Eurosia, Casinalbo, Fondo Paviani and Narde di Frattesina, through strontium, oxygen and carbon isotope analysis on a large sample size (150 individuals). The integration between biogeochemical, osteological and archaeological data has enabled us to retrace different patterns of mobility among different categories of individuals.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
The Ex-SPACE project aims to explore trends in social permeability in some ancient communities of Europe, focussing on scientific analysis of a selection of Italian pre-protohistoric burial contexts. The ‘social permeability’ of a group refers to its capacity to incorporate non-locals. What this research seeks to understand is how this pattern changes across time, space and social groups, and how it articulates with the radical socio-cultural transformations that arose during the second half of the 3rd millennium BC up to the late 2nd millennium BC. Italy represents one of the archaeologically richest regions of Europe, in terms of number of sites, their visibility across the landscape and the quantity of materials preserved in museums. In addition, as repeatedly highlighted in the archaeological literature, northern Italy was a cultural crossroads between Central Europe and the Mediterranean world, if not also a target of invasions. The scientific challenge of this research is to identify non-local individuals among mortuary contexts and to understand the impact that these allogeneic components had on the socio-economic development of communities, in the wider context of demographic change from Late Copper Age unstable village communities to Late Bronze Age proto-urban centres.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITY OF DURHAM · DURHAMCoordinatorUnited Kingdom
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union