ERC Starting Grant : LUMIERE to Christophe Snoeck

03/09/2020 - 09:45

Christophe Snoeck - ERC Starting Grant: Project: LUMIERE - Landscape Use and Mobility in EuRopE - Bridging the gap between cremation and inhumation

This ERC project shed a new light on changes in mobility, migration patterns and landscape use of early populations in Europe by merging information obtained directly from both cremated and inhumed individuals using state-of-the art bioarchaeology methods. 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.

Christophe Snoeck combines his multi-disciplinary expertise in the fields of archaeology and geochemistry to answer key archaeological questions. He is a research professor and post-doctoral at the VUB research groups Analytical, Environmental and Geo-Chemistry (AMGC) and the Maritime Cultures Research Institute (MARI). Since 2018, he has also been the scientific coordinator of the inter-university CRUMBEL project, which focuses on studying cremated populations from Belgium to better understand population dynamics between the Neolithic and the early medieval period.