York archaeologist awarded prestigious ERC Synergy Grant

News

Posted on Thursday 6 November 2025

The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded Professor Oliver Craig and colleagues a €10 million Synergy Grant to study hunter-gatherer population dynamics during the Holocene, the current geological period that spans the last 12,000 years.

Awarded by the European Research Council (ERC), the Synergy Grant supports world-leading teams tackling some of the most difficult and ambitious research questions. This year, Professor Oliver Craig from the Department of Archaeology, is among the recipients.

Hunter-gatherer communities

Together with Dr Enrico Crema, University of Cambridge, Professor Peter Jordan, Lund University and Professor Anna-Marie Prentiss, University of Montana, Professor Craig will lead a 37 person team from 9 different institutions (UK, US, Canada, Sweden, Denmark, Estonia, and Japan) and 6 project partners/collaborators (including Xwistern and Anishnàbe First Nations) to explore how hunter-gatherer communities across the Northern hemisphere achieved large population growth, social complexity and resilience long before agriculture was the dominating way of life.

By engaging with local decedent communities, combining archaeological science, computational modelling and climate research, the FORAGER project will challenge the traditional view that settled farming societies uniquely drove demographic and cultural expansion.

Professor Craig said: “Despite living in similar environments, cross-cultural comparisons between temperate hunter-gatherers from North America, East Asia and Northern Europe are astonishingly rare.

“Here we aim to unify an approach to this key phase in our history and shift the agenda away from agriculture as the main driver for social and cultural evolution that has prevailed, in Western thought at least, for centuries.”

Big impact

Set up by the European Union in 2007, the ERC is the leading European funding organisation for big impact research. It funds researchers of any nationality and age to run projects based across Europe.

The ERC Synergy Grants foster collaboration between outstanding researchers, making it possible for them to combine their expertise, knowledge and resources in order to push the boundaries of scientific discovery. This funding is part of the EU’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme.

Professor Maria Leptin, President of the European Research Council, said:
“Collaboration is at the heart of the ERC Synergy Grants. In our latest round, teams of researchers will join forces to address the most complex scientific problems together - this time, they are more international than ever. Such scientific endeavours are what Europe needs to be at the real forefront.”

Learn more on the ERC website.