This ERC (European Research Council) project aims to shed light on changes in mobility, migration patterns and landscape use of early populations in Europe by bringing together information obtained directly from both cremated and inhumed individuals using state-of-the art bioarchaeology. 

The aim is to identify and characterise the movement of people on a local, regional and European scale to explain how and why people moved, as well as how they used their surrounding landscape between the Neolithic to the Early Medieval period, when both cremation and inhumation were practised.

The CRIME project is a joint Flemish-Slovenian research project funded by the Flemish Research Foundation (FWO) and the Slovenian Research Agency (ARRS), with the aim of improving and increasing international research and development cooperation. This interdisciplinary project is using state-of-the-art techniques to introduce and upgrade methodological procedures for the study of archaeological heritage, focusing on the research of prehistoric funeral rituals and their changes.

The CRUMBEL project studies the collections of cremated bone found in Belgium dating from the Neolithic to the Early-Medieval period using state of the art analytical and geochemical analyses. Recording the Belgian collections in a database including as much osteoarchaeological information represents a crucial part of this project. Until now the dominance of cremation as funeral practice between 3000 BC and 700 AD in Northern Europe led to limited information on migrations and living conditions. The CRUMBEL project will greatly improve our current understanding of how people lived in Belgium, and is funded by the Excellence of Science (EOS) framework supported by the FWO and the F.R.S.-FNRS, which promotes joint research projects between Flemish and French-Speaking Universities of Belgium.

The Ebb and Flow project, based at the University of Oxford (PI – Rick Schulting), is funded by a Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant. It addresses outstanding questions about human-river interaction in later prehistoric Britain by exploring rivers at multiple scales using a diverse suite of data, drawing on archaeology and biomolecular science, anthropology, and earth science. Christophe Snoeck is Co-I on this project and contributes to the palaeomobility aspects of this research. 

The jagWARS project, based at the University of Oxford (PI – Joanna Ostapkowicz), supported by a Gerda Henkel Stiftung Research Grant, brings together more than 100 surviving carvings from over 30 international museums in a study of their material, chronology and iconography. In providing an overview of the dispersed corpus, the project is in a position to place this little-known artistic heritage within its cultural and historic context for the first time. Christophe Snoeck is a partner on this project and carries out strontium isotope analyses of the different artefacts to identify their geographical origin.

The MAMA Project, the VUB Starting Grant of Christophe Snoeck, aims to create spatial modelling tools to better interpret the isotopic data obtained in terms of mobility and landscape use, and further develop the open-access on-line database IsoArcH 

The Make-up of the City is an interdisciplinary research project, funded by the VUB Strategic Research Fund, which combines chemistry, osteology, and archaeology to reconstruct the medieval history of the city of Ypres, Belgium. It brings together historians, archaeologists, geochemists and anatomists to better understand the lives and deaths of the inhabitants of Medieval Ypres.  

MEMOR will create an open access database that provides information on the availability and location of all human skeletal collections (burnt and unburnt) in Flanders to facilitate future research. Initially, the database will contain information on human remains only, but eventually can be expanded with more categories, including zooarchaeological remains and grave goods. The second aspect of MEMOR concerns with the ethical issues that occur when working with human remains. MEMOR will be working together with several other parties, such as religious organisations, to develop an ethical framework that will aid decisions that need to be made when handling, analysing, storing and possibly reburying human remains.

Funded by the Flemish Heritage Agency, the ALIMENT project aims to track changes in animal breeding practices and its relationship with urban food provisioning during the modern period. Using 17th to 19th century faunal remains this project explores innovations and transformations in the agricultural economy of Flanders, within a historical context of demographic growth and increasing demand for food products. Particular attention is paid to critically assessing the timing and nature of the so called “agricultural revolution”.

In collaboration with several partners (Universiteit Gent, Universiteit Leiden, Center for Artefact Research vzw, Centrum voor Agrarische Geschiedenis, Dienst Stadsarcheologie Gent and Raakvlak Brugge), ALIMENT also provides detailed inventories and reports about regional faunal collections from a largely neglected period. The results will function as an important tool for the management of these collections, as a baseline for future research and as a foundation for a number of public outreach activities.

The SEXI International Joint Research Group brings together researchers from the VUB and the University of Ljubljana (UL). SEXI aims at developing and optimizing the study of archaeological sites across the world from their discovery to the state-of-the-art geochemical analyses of the animal and human remains excavated at the site.

Bringing together researchers from Brussels (both VUB and ULB) and Oxford (RLAHA), the BONE International Joint Research Group aims at improving our understanding of the diagenetic alterations of bioapatites from a wide range of different contexts.