From Caves to Terraces and Moorlands

As we come to the end of 2025, my final blog post of the year is a reflection on research outputs. Here are the three academic papers I published this year as part of collaborative projects with fantastic teams of co-authors.

The first paper of the year was an overview of the pan‑European TerraSAgE project, published in Geoarchaeology, led by Tim Kinnaird. This comes from our AHRC project that started in 2019, and had a few unfortunate hiccups due to COVID (totally scuppered our fieldwork schedule). There will be more to come from this project at a later date, but this paper presents our framework for understanding terrace life cycles from construction to abandonment across the Aegean, Croatia, Italy, Spain, and Galicia, showing how these ancient systems inspire sustainable land‑management today.

Our micromorphology deep‑dive into Fodongdi Cave, published in Journal of Archaeological Science, was led by Jinxu Wu, whose high-resolution thin-section analysis revealed how tiny sediment layers, charcoal specks, and minerals captured Pleistocene-era climatic shifts and early human responses. Jinxu spent a year working with myself and other colleagues at Newcastle University as part of his PhD, and this paper represents a major output from his thesis. It is a very technical and thorough examination of a complex cave stratigraphy, and I believe should set a standard for how such deposits should be approached. It is also a great example of effective use of multi proxy methods to support interpretations of thin section observations.

Finally, on Alston Moor, Eline van Asperen led our pollen‑core study from just south of Hadrian’s Wall, published in Environmental Archaeology and made possible thanks to various funders including the Royal Archaeological Institute who supported the fieldwork and laboratory analyses. We traced 10,000 years of woodland rise and fall, from Neolithic forest to Iron Age and Roman clearance, medieval regrowth, to the modern openness we see today, highlighting how deep vegetation history shapes present‑day rewilding debates. This study developed from Damian Rudge’s MA thesis, which looked at evidence for Roman impact on the environment relating to mining. Whilst this is a small scale study, it is hugely important in demonstrating the value of high resolution, well dated, core records, that carefully consider archaeological evidence, in understanding not only what landscapes have looked like at different points in time, but how they respond to different types of human activity. We are hoping to take this work forward with a larger sample set next year, if we can secure the funding.

So, three quite different projects, broadly linked by the theme of understanding human-environment dynamics, at different points in time, and in a range of contrasting landscapes. Given all the other things that have happened over the past year, I am very happy that we managed to get these papers out there, and I look forward to continued collaborations with all three teams.