|
Former Environmental Archaeology Unit (EAU) University of York The Environmental Archaeology was a research group within the Department of Biology at the University of York . It was established in 1975 with funding from the then Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission (Department of the Environment) and the Leverhulme Trust. For many years, four Research Fellows were funded by the Ancient Monuments Laboratory of English Heritage , and a variable number of other staff (typically four or five) were supported from commercial contracts and English Heritage project funding. The Unit strove towards an integrated approach to environmental archaeology, drawing together information from many aspects of the subject, including studies of soils and sediments, pollen, plant macrofossil remains of all kinds, invertebrates (including parasitic nematodes, insects and other arthropods, and molluscs), and vertebrates. We considered that the integration of evidence is crucial in building a more solid foundation for the interpretation of the evidence as a whole from archaeological deposits, leading to the recovery of much more valuable information than work on single groups or isolated parallel studies. In 1995 the Departments of Archaeology and Biology at the University of York formed the interdisciplinary Centre for Palaeoecology, an umbrella for the activities of the EAU and other researchers in the broad areas of palaeoecology and environmental archaeology. From January 2003 the remaining staff of the Unit merged
with the Centre for Palaeoecology to form a new Centre for Human
Palaeoecology at the Department
of Archaeology, University of York. |
