The Projects

The Projects

Our 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 1Friederike Jesse
Ο Prehistoric axes in the Sahara: a neglected find category. Haches à gorges, necked axes, Darfurbeile – contextualization of a special form

Project 2Simone Wolf
Ο Connecting Foodways: Cultural Entanglement and Technological Transmission between the Middle Nile valley and central and eastern Africa during the Early Iron Age

Project 3Angelika Lohwasser
Ο Interregional Linkage Investigations in Northern Kordofan (InterLINK)

Project 4Carlos Magnavita / Zakinet Dangbet
Ο 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
Ο Cultivated Landscapes – Land-use and cultural landscape development in north-hemispheric African savannas

Project 6Philipp Hoelzmann
Ο ‘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
Ο Routes of Interaction: Interregional Contacts between the Northern Horn of Africa and the Nile Region

Project 8 Ingo Heinrich
Ο ClimCellMed – Climate dynamics during the late Holocene derived from Cell structure measurements of juniper trees in the eastern Mediterranean

Project 9Henning Schreiber / Nikolas Gestrich
Ο 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
Ο 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
Ο FAIR.rdm: data management as a basis for meaningful and fair use of archaeological legacy data

Project 12 Jörg Linstädter
Ο Coordinator Project

Project 13 Sonja Magnavita
Ο Tracing Connections: Chemical analysis of archaeological pottery as indicator of interregional contacts in Western and Saharan Africa before AD 1300

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