The ERC funded project “From CORrelations to EXplanations: towards a new European prehistory” or in short COREX (Synergy grant) was launched on the 1st of May 2021.
In the project, researchers from the University of Gothenburg, the University College London, and the University of Copenhagen collaborate to explain the key processes that formed the genetic and cultural diversity of Europe north of the Mediterranean from the beginning of farming c.6000 BCE, to the end of the Scandinavian Bronze Age c.500 BCE. Led by Kristian Kristiansen, Mark Thomas, and Kurt Henrik Kjær as principal investigators, this project is designed to address the impact and consequences of the ancient DNA revolution in archaeology constructively. To achieve this, geneticists, paleo-botanists, archaeozoologists, and geologists will work together in a multidisciplinary collaboration modelling their data to allow us to move from correlations to explanations of how changes have been shaped by the dynamic interaction of cultural innovation, migration, admixture, population growth and collapse, dietary change, biological adaptation, social structure, and the emergence of new diseases.
The research will be tackled in four interconnected work packages dealing with the integration of genomic findings with new archaeological contextual data, detailed environmental DNA reconstructions, the connection of the high-resolution contextual analyses to innovative integrated model-based frameworks that can correlate the commonalities and differences among different times and places, and the explanation of those relationships using generative models by considering how local processes lead to global, continent-wide phenomena. We are looking forward to working together in this exciting project moving towards a new European prehistory.