Keynote lectures

Tales from a small island: archaeological genomics on the Atlantic edge

Dan Bradley & Lara Cassidy

When: Wednesday 30 August, Opening Ceremony, 19:00 - 19:30 BST (British Summer Time)

This shared talk focuses on our work on the ancient genomics of Ireland and examines three features of past societies: migration, kinship and survival. These leave signatures on the genome, which can tell the story of a single individual or entire island. First, we characterize the ebb and flow of migration to Ireland: are perceived shifts in ancestry the result of gradual transitions or did the island experience episodes of population replacement more akin to cliff edges? If the latter can we appreciate the complexity in a sharp transition? With denser sampling and sensitive haplotype-based methods, we can detect local-migrant interactions and patterns of individual mobility. Second, we leverage haplotypes to identify near and distant biological relatives. Kinship practices and group identities can shape patterns of genetic relatedness and inbreeding within and between communities, which we explore through several case studies. Third, the health of populations and individuals is shaped by short and long-term interactions between genes and the environment. Ancient genomes allow us to chart the trajectories of important mutations and reveal the past selective pressures that have helped mould the population of the island today.

Biography

Dan Bradley
Dan Bradley was brought up on a Northern Irish farm and after a degree in Genetics from Cambridge University and PhD in medical genetics from Trinity College Dublin he started to work on the genetics of each species present on that farm, including Irish humans, and has done for over 30 years. With his colleagues he has combined analysis of ancient and modern cattle to inform on the origins of these and other domesticates and pioneered the molecular genetic analysis of Irish populations. With his colleague Lara Cassidy, he leads the ancient DNA laboratory in Trinity College Dublin. He holds a Personal Chair in Population Genetics in Trinity and was awarded the 2020 Royal Irish Academy Gold Medal in the Life Sciences.

Lara Cassidy
Lara Cassidy is currently an assistant professor at Trinity College Dublin, where she completed her PhD in ancient human genomics in 2017 under the supervision of Dan Bradley. Her doctoral thesis established a working framework for the genetic history of northwest Europe and resolved longstanding questions on the origins of the modern Irish population. More recently, she has focused on the inference of past social organisation in Ireland and Britain by leveraging finescale patterns of relatedness and inbreeding. She is particularly interested in the emergence of social stratification and provided evidence for a hereditary elite in Irish passage tomb societies. Her team are also leveraging Ireland’s insularity and long-term genetic continuity to study the evolutionary forces that have shaped human health and disease.

Spreading the news. The role of individuals, social networks and sociocultural variability in the spread of Copper Age innovations

Zsuzsanna Siklósi

When: Thursday 31, Aug 18:45 - 19:45 BST
Where: New Physics Building, room Larmor

The existence of an independent Copper Age has been long debated. In the 20th century, Colin Renfrew’s large-scale narrative connected the beginnings of metallurgy and the emergence of social inequality to this period. Andrew Sherratt summarized Copper Age innovations in his model of the secondary products revolution, based on which later great civilizations rose.

Later, many postprocessualist archaeologists argued against large-scale narratives and pointed out that there is a need for local stories and studying individuals. After the development of new analytical methods, many tools appeared in the 21st century that allowed a detailed description of individual lifeways.

The Early and Middle Copper Age in Hungary is a good illustration of how the concept of archaeological culture, which is still used as an analytical unit, covers sociocultural diversity. This talk will demonstrate how we can write a narrative while maintaining individual and local diversity and build a multiscalar model from the individual level through communities up to the regional scale by combining multidisciplinary analytical methods. As we take into consideration the differences in material culture, mobility, access to resources at the individual and community levels and the different local traditions, we can reveal a colourful, mosaic and diverse cultural picture, which is in stark contrast to the previous, culturally homogeneous picture, and is an evidence of the success of a vivid network organized by small-scale communities. This contribution will summarize the results of our team’s research, which has been going on for more than ten years, and our next steps.

Biography

Zsuzsanna Siklósi is an assistant professor at the Institute of Archaeological Sciences, Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest, Hungary). She is an expert in the Neolithic and Copper Age of the Carpathian Basin and focuses on various social archaeological issues. She is committed to the combination of multidisciplinary methods with archaeology. Her MA dissertation on Neolithic prestige goods won a publication award, and she wrote her PhD dissertation on the potential traces of Late Neolithic social inequality. Since then, her research interest has been the Copper Age. In connection with the research of social issues of the 5th millennium BCE, she has specialized in radiocarbon dating.

She is currently leading two major research projects. One of them aims to model the spread of early copper artefacts and the technology of metallurgy from Southeast to Central Europe using a combination of lead isotope analysis, chemical composition analyses and radiocarbon dating.

She is the PI of the MTA-ELTE Lendület "Momentum" Innovation Research Group (https://lendulet-innovacio.hu/en/), which uses multidisciplinary methods to investigate the factors that affect the spread of innovations. The team combines the methods of biosocial archaeology with material culture studies to create a multiscalar model from the individual level through communities to the regional scale to understand the transmission of the know-how and which factors influenced these transmissions.

HeMo lab: A Platform for Monitoring and Reconception of Cultural Heritage of Ukraine

Vasyl Rozhko

When: Friday 1 Sept, 13:00 - 14:00 BST
Where: New Physics Building, room Larmor

Russia's war is destroying Ukrainians and our heritage faster than the Soviet Union did, which left the system of governance inefficient. Without heritage registers – what are we really saving? Without a data infrastructure – how can we manage tons of data from field expeditions to make available for conservation or criminal investigations? The number of destructions is increasing, as are the initiatives that document them in their own way and form a chaotic accumulation without metadata. There is lack of basic heritage registers from state authoritative data sets; there are no policies for working with data; extremely low capacity of state bodies to monitor heritage.

We are building HeMo, a monitoring laboratory. HeMo collects up-to-date heritage data, links it to the register and places it in a database according to standards and an infrastructure approach, and makes it available to beneficiaries - for the ministry, for regional administrations, for donors, conservators and special services. We do 3D models, damage assessment and forensic documentation of heritage destruction. We create a data and GIS infrastructure to verify and store information. Our goals are restoration of objects; return of stolen artifacts; criminal proceedings against russia; presentation, popularization of heritage; heritage management. We also attract and train experts and activists to use monitoring tools and scale up in regions, creating a network. After the war, HeMo lab will become a civil society tool for public monitoring of the state of heritage and conservation as a lever on a sustainable basis.

Biography

Vasyl Rozhko is the founder of HeMo: Ukrainian Heritage Monitoring Lab and the co-founder and co-coordinator of Heritage Emergency Response Initiative, HERI. He currently serves as the head of Tustan NGO, which is involved in promoting the protection and development of the Annalistic Town of Tustan and its protected areas. In the past he worked as the Head of the Department of Museums for the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine, where his responsibilities included crisis emergency response management for museums and inventory of museums and collections in Ukraine, among other tasks. Between the years 2005 and 2014 he led the Tustan State Historical and Cultural Reserve, where he was in charge of heritage property and protection documentation procedures, Cliffs technical monitoring and conservation program, graphical reconstruction of the medieval log cliffside fortress of Tustan, and the Ukrainian Medieval Culture Festival ‘Tu Stan!’. He is a graduate of the Lviv Business School of UCU and Lviv Polytechnic National University.

African Archaeology in Times of Climate Change Crisis

Freda Nkirote M’Mbogori

When: Saturday 2 Sept, 13:00 - 14:00 BST
Where: New Physics Building, room Larmor

The relevance of archaeology in climate change debates cannot be overemphasized. Climatic adaptation and mitigation is a historical, cultural and material phenomenon – the temporal trends that archaeology explores thus set a critical foundation for the future. Globally, the Net-zero agenda has been embraced with most countries hoping to achieve the desired emission and absorption levels by the year 2050. But while the focus is on future global levels of emissions, the effects of global warming continue to be felt unevenly around the world, especially in the Global South, including Africa. Here archaeological narratives drawing on deep Indigenous Knowledge and weaved through transdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches, can play an important role in advising policy and communities in several ways. This lecture will discuss archaeology’s potential contribution to climate action using lessons learnt from arid Northern Kenya and Southern Ethiopia where global warming has claimed the lives of millions of people and animals. The cases presented will particularly focus on past human and environment interactions in these regions and how these relationships have been interrupted by global warming.

Biography

Dr M’Mbogori is an Archaeologist and a Senior Research Scientist at the National Museums of Kenya. She is a former Country Director of the British Institute in Eastern Africa (BIEA) and an immediate former President of Pan African Archaeological Association. Dr M’Mbogori’s research on the Early Iron Age in Kenya is fundamental to questions about the origins of modern economic strategies, heritage, land use and identities. Her archaeological research and community engagements have enriched our understanding of human and environment interactions and our archaeological interpretations for policy advice.