Archaeology in the Service of Sustainability

The Ancient Environmental Genomics Initiative for Sustainability (AEGIS) is a eight year research project generously funded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation and Wellcome Trust that seeks to analyze ancient environmental DNA together with other biomolecular evidence from soils, sediments, ice, and oceans, to uncover how past ecosystems adapted to climate change. The goal of this is to inform the development of climate-resilient crops and stronger biodiversity conservation for a warming planet. 

As part of this project we are examining early domestication and farming systems in the Near East and Europe, to investigate how ancient DNA can inform our understanding of the processes and environments in which early plant domestication occurred. In our talk, we will discuss our recent fieldwork in Jordan, Italy, Albania and Bulgaria, present some very early results of our work, and look ahead to our next steps in this multi-year project.