Category: Department of Anthropology and Archaeology

By Dr Lorena Becerra-Valdivia, Senior Research Associate, Department of Anthropology and Archaeology

Dr Lorena Becerra-Valdivia tells us about her Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship project which investigates how two major climatic events—the Antarctic Cold Reversal and the Younger Dryas—affected the initial human settlement of South America over 10,000 years ago. Using radiocarbon dating, the project examines whether a correlation exists between climate change and human response, offering new insights into human adaptability that are particularly relevant in today’s climate-challenged world.

As an archaeological scientist, my work focuses on using laboratory-based methods to answer questions about our human past. My primary tool, radiocarbon dating, enables us to determine the age of archaeological objects and human remains, placing them within a secure timeline. Radiocarbon dating works by measuring the amount of carbon-14, a radioactive (unstable) form of carbon (see image below), left in once-living materials. All living organisms contain carbon, including carbon-14. After death, they stop absorbing carbon-14, which then begins to break down at a slow, predictable rate. By measuring how much carbon-14 remains in a sample, we can estimate when the organism died—up to about 55,000 years ago. In archaeology, radiocarbon dating addresses the foundational question of ‘when’ certain events occurred in the past, forming the basis for exploring other key questions—’why,’ ‘how,’ ‘who,’ and ‘what.’ After all, without knowing the chronological context of archaeological findings, we cannot fully interpret their significance, the circumstances of their creation, or the cultures and individuals behind them.

This leads me to my current research project titled, ‘The role of abrupt climatic shifts in the initial settlement of South America’, funded by the Leverhulme Trust until 2026. This project investigates human-climate-environment interactions during the settlement of that continent more than 10,000 years ago, with an aim to assess the impact of two millennia-long climatic phases—the Antarctic Cold Reversal (ACR) and Younger Dryas—on this process. A milestone of the project has been a recent publication in the journal Nature Communications, which presents a cultural timeline—constructed from approximately 150 archaeological sites and 1,700 dates (see image below)—and compares the results against past climatic records. One of the novel findings featured in this publication is that extreme cold conditions did not seem to hinder human occupation in regions hardest hit by the ACR, including southernmost regions like Patagonia and high-altitude Andes. These results underscore the remarkable adaptability of early South Americans and highlight the likely critical role of knowledge transmission for survival during climatic adversity.

The idea for my Leverhulme project emerged from a multi-disciplinary environment in Australia in 2020, as I was helping establish a new radiocarbon dating facility. As is often the case, this new facility was not based within an Archaeology department, but rather within a centralised scientific unit with closer links to Chemistry and Earth Sciences. Here, my colleagues primarily studied past climatic and environmental dynamics instead of human activities. Radiocarbon dating provides a bridge for those who study the past, however, allowing us to connect cultural and climatic events through timeline construction—for instance, aligning archaeological evidence for human migration into Australia with sea-level and temperature fluctuations. As the Leverhulme project approaches its conclusion in early 2026, I am again embracing multidisciplinary collaboration to pivot towards research that applies insights from our ancient past to contemporary challenges such as food security. This next phase will be both challenging and invigorating, requiring me to step beyond my comfort zone. By connecting human and climatic histories, past and present, my new project will aim to demonstrate that understanding the past is essential for addressing current and future global issues.

Dr Lorena Becerra-Valdivia is a Senior Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology with research interests in archaeological science, radiocarbon dating, chronology, past human-climate-environment interactions, and ancient hominin dispersals. To find out more about Lorena’s project and research, please contact lorena.becerra-valdivia@bristol.ac.uk or @lorenabecval.bsky.social.

By Dr Lucy Cramp, Dr Tim Knowles, Professor Ian Bull, Dr Mélanie Roffet-Salque, Professor Richard Evershed, Professor Tim Elliott and Dr Jamie Lewis

A team of University of Bristol researchers, led by Dr Lucy Cramp in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, have been awarded a £1m grant from the AHRC to establish a new Centre for Chemical Characterisation in Heritage Science (C3HS). Bringing together expertise in Archaeology, Chemistry and Earth Sciences, the Centre will help to determine the origin of heritage objects and materials, leading to informed conservation strategies and impactful discoveries about the past.

The University of Bristol have received a £1m capital investment grant to establish a world-leading facility that will welcome diverse research and researchers from across the heritage sector, enhancing its analytical capabilities in the process. New cutting-edge analytical instrumentation for high resolution organic molecular analysis will enable enhanced and reliable identification and structural characterisation of organic compounds in complex mixtures, such as pottery residues and organic components of pigments, binders and balms. A new preparative capillary gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer will facilitate the separation, collection and structural verification of individual archaeological compounds in sufficient quantities for radiocarbon dating, whilst newly refurbished lasers in the School of Earth Sciences will be used for the measurement of isotopic signals from different points during the formation of archaeological teeth at high temporal resolution.

These advancements will be made possible thanks to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) recently announcing a new funding programme to establish infrastructure for heritage science and conservation in the UK. The aim of this programme is to enhance the UK capability and capacity for heritage science, and in so doing, bring new knowledge on heritage collections, buildings, landscapes and data. As part of this programme, AHRC announced a major funding call for host facilities and equipment across the UK, to open up access to specialist knowledge, equipment and collections across the heritage sector.

Here at the University of Bristol, we have a long history of driving forwards pioneering mass spectrometric methodologies, and have exceptional capabilities for molecular and isotope analyses, in the heritage sciences. We have expertise and infrastructure that spans and integrates three schools and two faculties: the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology in the School of Arts (ALSS), the Organic Geochemistry Unit in the School of Chemistry and the Bristol Isotope Group housed in the School of Earth Sciences (SEng). Facilities include an ultra-compact, high-precision radiocarbon accelerator. The Bristol Radiocarbon Accelerator Mass Spectrometry facility (BRAMS) was established by the School of Chemistry as a UoB/NERC/BBSRC-funded national facility in 2016 and is housed in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology. This has led to major methodological developments, including the capability to radiocarbon date individual preserved fatty acids from food residues extracted from archaeological pottery.

Left: Bristol Radiocarbon Accelerator Mass Spectrometry facility (BRAMS), led by the School of Chemistry and housed in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology. Right: an archaeological potsherd being cleaned prior to extraction of ancient lipids for analysis.

Across the Schools of Chemistry, Arts and Earth Sciences, we have laboratories and instrumentation for highly sensitive analysis of molecular and isotopic signals held in archaeological materials, including ancient food residues preserved in pottery, climatic signals held in historical parchments, pigments and binders used in works of art and the composition of mummy balms from ancient Egypt. The Bristol Isotope Group uses world-leading mass spectrometric instrumentation to explore intra-lifetime patterns in human and animal diet and mobility from isotope signatures in biological remains. Recent major discoveries by the project team include establishing the palaeoecological range of honeybees exploited by the earliest farmers of Neolithic Europe, Near East and North Africa from beeswax residues in pottery, identifying the earliest-discovered lipid signatures for cereal use, along with milk, from 6000 year old Scottish ‘crannogs’ (artificial or semi-artificial ‘islets’) and the detailed analysis of milk use in prehistory to provide a new theory for its relationship with the evolution of the ability to digest milk (lactase persistence) that exists amongst modern-day populations.

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‘There is a major demand for access to these approaches to characterise, provenance and date organic materials, and this new infrastructure will open-up access to advanced instrumentation that does not exist together elsewhere. The expertise within the Centre team will support the development of the highest quality projects and research excellence, drawing in the research potential from developer-funded archaeology and the wider heritage sector beyond academia’

Dr Jim Williams, Historic England (project partner)

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We will shortly be appointing new staff to join the team and over the next 24 months, we will be installing, testing and verifying protocols on our new instruments installed in our laboratories and undertaking refurbishments to existing systems to enhance performance. From 2026 we will be ready to offer access to a facility for single- and multi-molecular and isotope mass spectrometry approaches that can be applied to heritage materials to further understand their composition, origins and age. In addition to the analytical facilities, we will provide access to the latest methods and protocols we develop, as well as providing training, analytical and interpretative support. The ability to coordinate these major types of mass spectrometry analysis will simplify the route to molecular and isotope analyses, unlocking new, ambitious and scientifically-rigorous research on heritage collections.

Dr Lucy Cramp is Associate Professor in Archaeology with research interests in ancient biomolecules, dietary traditions and prehistoric subsistence strategies. The AHRC Centre for Chemical Characterisation (C3HS) is part of the Research Infrastructure for Conservation and Heritage Science (RICHeS) programme, funded by the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council through the UKRI Infrastructure Fund. To find out more about it, please contact lucy.cramp@bristol.ac.uk. Read our press announcement to find out more about the AHRC investment.  

By Dr William Tantam, Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, School of Arts

Dr William Tantam tells us about a collaborative project which sought to challenge the silencing of child sexual abuse. Taking an arts-led approach, William and his collaborators produced a ‘zine’ to engage mental health professionals, academics, and most importantly, survivors of child sexual abuse, placing their voices at the centre of clinical and policy discussions. The project received an AHRC Impact Acceleration Account award and William has since received a REPHRAIN grant to further his research.

‘Voicing Silence: amplifying the voices of victims and survivors of non-recent child sexual abuse’ sought to challenge the silencing of child sexual abuse through attention to the ways in which victims and survivors are, or have been, silenced. This silencing includes inappropriate or improper responses to disclosures of sexual abuse, poor follow up, disbelieving, and no further action taken to reporting. It also includes the pervasive cultures of silence that coalesce around child sexual abuse which make it more difficult for victims and survivors to report at the time of the abuse, and to delay disclosing the sexual abuse until later in life.

The Breaking Silences zine produced by William and his collaborators.

• To navigate through the zine, click on the arrow icons in the bottom left and right of the zine.
• To view the zine in full screen, click on the second icon in the top right of the zine.

The zine and workshop emerged from a network of academics, clinicians, therapists, and activists (some of whom are victims and survivors). At the heart of the group was a commitment to centring the needs and perspectives of victims and survivors, and ensuring that their voices feed into practice and policy. Network members have also disseminated the zine in their different academic, clinical, and activist communities in order to reach as wide an audience as possible, including in NHS trusts, clinical training groups, and academic environments. It is also being used as a learning material at the Tavistock Trauma Centre for professionals likely to receive disclosures of child sexual abuse.

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“We wanted a zine that captured the challenges of child sexual abuse and silences, but which also captured the hope and possibilities enabled by survivor-centred approaches“

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The process of producing the zine enabled the group to clarify our meanings and understandings. In preparation, each of us submitted two sentences of what we would like to say in the zine. Armed with Pritt sticks and sheets of coloured card we spent two hours in groups cutting up the sentences, placing them in different orders, and considering how the meaning, tone, and voice changed as we spliced together different passages. Often these new combinations generated deeper meaning and turns of phrase, or produced new insights that we hadn’t quite articulated in our initial attempts. We were inspired by the wonderful ‘Mad Zines’ project and tried to draw on some of the energy and vitality produced in their outputs. 

A further strength – and really the heart of the final output – was the creative contributions of members of the group. Dr Khadj Rouf (zine co-editor and Consultant Clinical Psychologist with Northamptonshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust) provided beautiful poetry, complemented by a cover artwork by Dr Sara Scott, and incredible illustrations provided by the multi-talented Jenissa Paharia. We wanted a zine that captured the challenges of child sexual abuse and silences, but which also captured the hope and possibilities enabled by survivor-centred approaches.

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“At the heart of the group was a commitment to centring the needs and perspectives of victims and survivors, and ensuring that their voices feed into practice and policy”

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Drawing on this initial project, and a further ESRC IAA grant exploring how to improve responses to disclosures of child sexual abuse, I have developed a further project into the particular challenges faced by survivors of online-facilitated child sexual abuse, funded by REPHRAIN. Working with Dr Susanna Alyce, Co-Investigator, this new project incorporates a survivor-produced ‘zine’ that will provide key learning into this area that remains under-explored, and from the people most impacted by these insights. We are delighted to be working with SARSAS, the Survivor’s Trust, and Survivors Voices in this new project which hopes to deploy survivor-centred insights for real-world change.

Dr William Tantam is Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology with research interests in trauma and gendered violence, and technology-facilitated sexual abuse. To find out more about William’s research, the Breaking Silences zine and his new REPHRAIN grant, please email william.tantam@bristol.ac.uk.

As the world turns its attention to Glasgow and the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties  – known as COP26 – we’re taking a look at some of the climate change-related research happening across the University of Bristol’s Faculty of Arts. For this first piece, we caught up with Dr Camilla Morelli, a Lecturer in Anthropology. Camilla specialises in the anthropology of childhood and youth, and the use of participatory visual methods in youth-centred research.

Hi Camilla! Thanks for joining Arts Matter. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what sparked your interest in your area of research? 

Hi! Thanks for inviting me. I have an absolute passion for my discipline – social anthropology – and specifically the anthropology of childhood and youth. My greatest inspiration is Margaret Mead, the first anthropologist to take children seriously as research respondents.

Most of my research has taken place in the Amazon rainforest, where I started working over ten years ago. I was interested in exploring Amazonian children’s relationships – physical and imagined – with the forest environment. When I got there, all the children would talk about was the city, and how much they love concrete! Through the years, I have become very close to the community in Peruvian Amazonia where I work, and I return every year to visit them and conduct further work. I haven’t been able to travel to Peru since the start of the pandemic, and it’s breaking my heart. I hope I’ll be able to go back there soon.

My current projects are co-designed with young people, and are based on collaborative approaches. The children I started working with ten years ago have now grown up, and two of them have become anthropologists themselves! They are now my key collaborators in a British Academy-funded project, ‘Animating the Future’, and will be co-authors in our published outputs. I’m sure in the future they will be leading their own projects and transforming the field of anthropology.

That’s great – how wonderful to hear that the future of anthropology is in such good hands! What insights have you gained from engaging with young people? 

I have learned so much working with children and young people! Something that I always find incredible is that children and youth have the capacity to radically transform the world through simple everyday actions, which are often unseen by adults. It astonishes me when I work with children to see how much their own parents don’t know about what happens in children’s daily worlds and imaginations. Then one day, all of a sudden, they realise that their children are substantially different from them, and they ask: “How did we get here?” They have no idea about the small, everyday actions through which children silently shape new futures. Once we appreciate that children and young people have this capacity and agency, we can give them more credit than we do, and perhaps work with them (rather than for them) so that we can build a sustainable future together.

Your latest research project, based in the UK, is called Waves of Change – can you tell us more about it? 

Sure! The project is based in Cornwall, where we are working with young people aged 15 to 18 to address the impact of climate change on coastal communities and their future. Cornwall is already feeling the effects of climate change hard – ocean acidification, plastic pollution (worsened by recent tourism) and warming are threatening the rich and unique marine ecosystems there, and sea levels are rising faster than average…meaning that Cornwall is sinking fast! Young people are at the forefront of these challenges and should have a key role in structuring debates around it. Yet, the young people we are working with often feel cut out of these debates. This sense of exclusion is heightened by the remote locations of their coastal communities, the limited access to public transport, and recent funding cuts to youth centres and activities.

Our project’s goal is to engage young people actively in a conversation on climate change and to help them share a message with the public and relevant policymakers. I have the privilege of working with two incredible women – the Co-Investigator Dani Schmidt, Professor of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol, and Sophie Marsh, professional animator and the project’s artistic director. Dani is bringing her world-leading expertise in climate change to the project, and Sophie is teaching young people how to become animation producers. We are partnering with a local charity, Young People Cornwall, whose mission is to give young people enhanced opportunities and promote inclusion.

That sounds like such a brilliant project, with an important impact on those communities. Climate change is currently at the top of many people’s agendas, with COP26 now in full swing. Naturally, much of the talk centres around the science, but your latest research project combines climate science with anthropology and visual arts – what can this interdisciplinary approach bring to the table?

This is very much a collaborative effort! Our interdisciplinary approach can hopefully bridge the field of climate science with the knowledge of local communities, and specifically that of young people. While science can tell us much about the causes and effects of climate change (Dani’s expertise), we need an approach that is centred on young people’s own perspectives and can explore their worldviews – and this is brought in by anthropology and ethnography (my own field). But in order to engage young people actively in the process, we need participatory methods. This is where animation (Sophie’s world) comes in. Co-production of animation is a great method that allows young people to write and animate (literally ‘give life to’) their own stories, and to share them with others. We want this project to do all of this, while giving young people a new sense of hope and empowering them to realise that their voices matter and can be heard widely.

You can follow the project here:

https://twitter.com/EthnoAnimation

https://www.instagram.com/ethno_animation/

Camilla Morelli is a Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Bristol. She specialises in the anthropology of childhood and youth, and the use of participatory visual methods in youth-centred research. Find out more about Camilla’s research.

Today, 9 August, marks the United Nations’ International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, raising awareness of the needs of indigenous people across the globe.

Dr Camilla Morelli, a lecturer in social anthropology here at the University of Bristol, has been working with indigenous communities in Amazonian Peru for over a decade. Here we learn more about her most recent piece of research.

Amazonimations – co-producing animated films with indigenous people in Amazonia

Amazonimations is a collection of three animated films produced collaboratively with the indigenous Matses people of the Amazon rainforest. The films are the outcome of a research project (funded by the British Academy) that brought together academic research, art and animation with the objective of using collaborative film production as a means through which people living at the margins of technological and economic inclusion can find forms of self-representation and gain a sense of wider recognition.

Like many other indigenous societies, Matses people had no contact with outsiders until fairly recently, and they are now dealing with the challenges of urbanisation, socioeconomic change, and the impact of globalised media and markets. Amidst the difficulties they face, a key issue is the feeling of being largely unheard and cut out from wider society; their goal, as they phrased it, is for the world to know who they are. In each animated short, a different generation of Matses tells a story: the elderly talk about the traditional ritual of ‘acate’, an intoxicating substance that is said to create a connection between people and the forest; Matses children tell a story about rainforest animals and spirits; and young Matses who migrated from the forest to the city discuss their experiences of adjusting to urban life.

This work is quintessentially collaborative – the films have been scripted, narrated and illustrated by Matses people themselves, and the overall goal of this is to disseminate the animations widely in order to raise awareness about threatened indigenous lives and their precarious futures. Learn more about the Matses people and their culture by watching Amazonimations on Vimeo.

We’d like to wish all members of the LGBT+ community a very Happy Pride Month! We caught up with Dr Jamie Lawson, a queer anthropologist whose major research interest is in sex and sexuality, to find out more about his research, Pride, and the path to equality for all.

What was it that first drew you into the exciting world of anthropology?

It was a lucky accident really – I got very bored at school, so come university application time I felt a strong urge to study something new. Archaeology and Anthropology was the first thing in the UCAS course book that fit the bill. I fell in love with anthropology quite quickly, though – I enjoy the freedom of the discipline, and felt a strong pull towards an intellectual tradition that resists being pinned down. It’s a big, sprawling subject with as many definitions and angles as there are practitioners, which is what you might expect from a discipline that’s focussed on understanding people; we’re complicated things, after all. There’s a very thin line between anthropology and activism as well – I think I always found the political engagement of the discipline really exciting.

What was it about sexual minorities and human sexuality in particular that led you to pursue a research career in this area?

I developed an interest in sex and sexuality towards the end of my undergraduate degree, and followed it through to master’s and eventually PhD level. Initially I adopted an evolutionary perspective on the topic, but found that a little too heteronormative for my tastes, and have drifted over the years towards a more phenomenological position, focussed on queer identities and subcultures. This led me to my recent work on the puppy play community. It’s no coincidence that over the same time, I became properly politically engaged with my identity as a gay man, and got involved with activist work, including organising the first Pride up in Durham, and eventually writing my book. I think it’s important to challenge the dominant structures of society which act to marginalise and oppress anyone who doesn’t fit in with the trans- and homophobic, racist and patriarchal norms.

You were involved in the Art of Relationships project at the Open University, which was designed to explore the power of art to engage members of the public with social science research – can you tell us more about that?

That was a lot of fun. The project involved screening a set of short films that had been made to communicate research findings from a large, nationwide project on love and relationships called ‘Enduring Love’. In order to evaluate the impact those films had, I ran a reflexive group exercise called a visual matrix (based on a social dreaming matrix, for anyone who has encountered one of those). The method is designed to tap into group-level, collective ideas and feelings rather than individual, to see what the audience collectively had taken from the films. A visual matrix is a wonderfully egalitarian method which breaks down the distinction, to some extent, between researcher and informants. We used it to see what sorts of ideas had made their way from the films to the audience, to see if it was possible to communicate research findings through art (in this case, films).

June is Pride month here in the UK – what does Pride mean to you?

This is a favourite question to ask queer people around Pride time – I’m never really sure how to answer it. Pride is about visibility, community and celebration, sure, but we should never forget that it was born out of anger. The rights that the LGBTQ+ community has fought for and gained, the space it carved out for itself – that was all the result of anger, focussed against oppression. Pride this year comes at a scary time – the world is in the grip of a pandemic, and the hard right have risen in political power. The protests that are currently sweeping the world as a result of systemic racism and anti-Black violence in the United States are also an expression of anger, deeply and collectively felt. My hope is that we can all come together around that anger and push back against those who want to strip minorities of their rights and turn us against each other. I am a very angry queer, and very proud of that anger.

Last year you released your first book – Rainbow Revolutions: Power, Pride and Protest in the Fight for Queer Rights – which is aimed at children aged 12 and over. What inspired you to write specifically for this age group?

The opportunity landed squarely in my lap. I was approached by the publisher off the back of some consulting work I had done for them on another project, and they asked if I would like to write a book on queer history for children. I said yes almost immediately. The mainstream, cishet world does everything it can to stop queer people feeling connected with each other, including dismissing the idea of there being such a thing as queer history. Being disconnected from your own history makes growing up queer a very isolating thing – you feel lost, untethered in a society that only begrudgingly makes space for you. Knowing that you have ancestors, traditions, that you belong to a group of people who learned lessons collectively and had an impact on the world, that’s empowering and important. I wrote the book for young queers, hoping I might help them feel a little bit less lost.

What is the key message you hope young people will take away from your book, and what impact do you hope it will have?

I wanted the readers of Rainbow Revolutions to understand that queer rights were fought for and won – not given – and that the community has a history of its own , and perhaps most importantly that Black and trans voices inside the LGBTQ+ community have been some of the most important and most powerful we’ve had. As trans people are having their rights stripped away and their lives endangered around the world, and as the Black Lives Matter protests sweep the globe, it’s hugely important that the readers of my book understand how connected we all are, and that none of us are free until all of us are free. I tried to reinforce an idea that collective action – that visibility en masse – is key to liberation and safety. Most of all I wanted them to know that they are not alone.

What societal changes do you think are required to get to a point where we can ensure young members of the LGBT+ community are fully supported, included, and safe from discrimination?

That’s a big question, and there are a lot of moving parts, but if I could wave a magic wand and make one big change (and if I knew there were others out there with their own magic wands) I would disconnect the idea of sex from the idea of reproduction. The idea that “sex is for making babies” is at the absolute core of the oppression of queer people, and the oppression of women (queer or not), around the world. It’s dangerous most of all because it feels like such a self-evident fact, and is so deeply embedded in Western cultures. Alongside that, I’d make white people around the world turn to face the evils of colonialism, and engage with our collective responsibility to dismantle the structures that supported it, of which trans- and homophobia are important components. Big aims, both, but I have to believe they’re possible.

What more do you think could be done as a Faculty – and more widely across the University – to support the LGBT+ community and ensure equality for all?

I think the higher education sector is starting to shift in really interesting and quite radical directions, and that’s what we need here: radical change. If we don’t make active decisions to disrupt colonialist, oppressive structures then they persist. I think the pandemic has forced us to start to think properly about what universities could and should be and how they could and should work, and to confront difficult facts about access and inclusion. Finding new ways to imagine the University will be key to equality for staff and students alike.