Major Horizon 2020 Award to the Arctic Centre

Peter Jordan, director of the Arctic Centre, has just been awarded major Horizon 2020 funding to support a Innovative Training Network (ITN). The University of Groningen will join the universities of York, Copenhagen and Stockholm in training a new generation of early-stage researchers in the latest inter-disciplinary methods in archaeological science, including ancient genomics, new radiocarbon dating methods, and organic residue analysis.

The total budget is 4.0 million Euros, with 0.80 million Euros coming to Groningen. The ITN title is ArchSci2020 - Archaeology on the Edge: Northern Europe and the Circumpolar World.

15 PhD projects

A total of 15 PhD projects are supported; each addresses the inter-locking themes of health, diet, technology, and human-environment relations, and applies them to archaeological case-studies located across the Northern World. Three PhDs will be based in Groningen: two at the Arctic Centre and a third with Daan Raemaekers at the Groningen Institute of Archaeology (GIA). Three further PhDs will spend up to 12 months in Groningen. Hans van der Plicht, from the Centre for Isotope Research at ESRIG, also plays a major role, and the University of Groningen will also host general training courses and the final ITN conference. The first PhDs start in August 2016.