In total over £500,000 has been awarded through the first call of the RICHeS Access Fund to 43 organisations across all four nations of the UK, enabling them access to specialist heritage science facilities, collections and expertise that would otherwise have been beyond their reach.
Information about the projects at Sheffield:
‘Animal bones as powerful carriers of meaning: memory and identity, life and death’
- Project Lead: Mandy Keating, Freelance Specialist
- RICHeS Investment Lead: SHEFF BIOARCH
Hidden within scientific collections, animal bones hold stories about life, death, environments and the changing relationship between humans and animals. This project brings a specialist zooarchaeology collection to new audiences through collaboration between researchers and artists.
Four independent freelance artists are working with animal skeletons from Sheffield's BIOARCH reference collection, to explore themes of memory, identity and human–animal connections, transforming scientific specimens into creative works that encourage reflection and discussion. Presented through the Festival of the Mind, the project will reveal the wider significance of animal bone collections beyond research and teaching, combining science and creativity to open new ways for audiences to understand the past and our changing relationship with the natural world.
Mandy Keating, Freelance Artist, said:
“Animal bones are rich cultural and scientific resources that preserve evidence of biology, human–animal relationships, and environmental and cultural change across time. They provide a unique way of exploring questions of memory, identity, life, and death. Artists will bridge research and the arts to reveal new perspectives on bone collections.”
‘Assiros Toumba: Weed ecology and Bronze Age cultivation intensity’
- Project Lead: Amy Bogaard, University of Oxford
- RICHeS Investment Lead: SHEFF BIOARCH
The Bronze Age Minoan and Mycenaean ‘palaces’ of 2nd millennium BCE southern Greece have attracted considerable interest as centres of the earliest state-level societies in Europe. This project seeks to investigate the development of complex societies in Europe by using agricultural production as a proxy for social organisation. It is based on the hypothesis that elite societies managed grain production through extensive agriculture, whereas communal, more egalitarian societies generated grain surplus through intensive agricultural production. A unique opportunity to explore this issue is afforded by the large grain storage complex at late 2nd-millennium BCE Assiros Toumba. The intensity of crop cultivation can be explored by two complementary archaeobotanical methods: stable isotope analysis of crop grains; and analysis of the ecological preferences of the weed species associated with stored grain, to establish the conditions under which they were grown. Having already conducted stable isotope analyses on archaeobotanical grain samples from numerous vessels in the Assiros Toumba storeroom complex, this project focuses on an investigation of the taxonomic identity of the weed seeds accompanying the grain, as a basis for ecological interpretation. These complementary techniques will provide a sound foundation for determining the growing conditions of the ancient arable fields, and thereby distinguish whether the crops were grown under intensive or extensive cultivation regimes.
More information about SHEFF BIOARCH can be found here including details about the collection and how to visit.
About the RICHeS Access Fund
The RICHeS Access Fund was created to remove those barriers, opening participation in heritage science to a far wider range of organisations. By providing access support, the RICHeS Access Fund is enabling organisations of all sizes, including those outside traditional research environments to ask new questions, develop innovative approaches and contribute to the UK’s heritage science capability.