The Projects
Our eleven research projects come from both the humanities and natural sciences and are interdisciplinary in nature. The focus is on archaeology, physical geography, geology, archaeometry, botany and linguistics, which enables us to study human settlement and land use in the context of climate and environmental change.
Michael Schmeling, licensed under CC BY 4.0 international, waterbodies © OpenStreetMap contributers, modification by Johanna Sigl
Project 1 – Friederike Jesse
Prehistoric axes in the Sahara: a neglected find category. Haches à gorges, necked axes, Darfurbeile – contextualization of a special form
Project 2 – Simone Wolf
Connecting Foodways: Cultural Entanglement and Technological Transmission between the Middle Nile valley and central and eastern Africa during the Early Iron Age
Project 3 – Angelika Lohwasser
Interregional Linkage Investigations in Northern Kordofan (InterLINK)
Project 4 – Carlos Magnavita / Zakinet Dangbet
The Lake Chad Region as a Crossroads: first archaeological and oral historical investigations into early Kanem-Borno and its intra-African connections
Project 5 – Alexa Höhn
Cultivated Landscapes – Land-use and cultural landscape development in north-hemispheric African savannas
Project 6 – Philipp Hoelzmann
‘De-Greening’ of the central Sahara: Holocene environmental dynamics in the Tibesti Mountains and the Ounianga Basin, Chad (DeGree)
Project 7 – Iris Gerlach / Brigitta Schütt / Dietrich Raue
Routes of Interaction: Interregional Contacts between the Northern Horn of Africa and the Nile Region
Project 8 – Ingo Heinrich
ClimCellMed – Climate dynamics during the late Holocene derived from Cell structure measurements of juniper trees in the eastern Mediterranean
Project 9 – Henning Schreiber / Nikolas Gestrich
Connecting the lower middle Niger through borrowed words and shared objects: Archaeo-linguistic network analysis and modelling of cultural entanglements between the Malian Sahara and the Nigerian forests (AD 700-1500)
Project 10 – Hans-Peter Wotzka
Boundaries, Frontiers, and Conduits in the Middle to Late Holocene Archaeology and Palaeoecology of the Inner Congo Basin
Project 11 – Brigitte Mathiak / Tilman Lenssen-Erz
FAIR.rdm: data management as a basis for meaningful and fair use of archaeological legacy data
Project 12 – Jörg Linstädter
Coordinator Project
Project 13 – Sonja Magnavita
Tracing Connections: Chemical analysis of archaeological pottery as indicator of interregional contacts in Western and Saharan Africa before AD 1300