Enrico R. Crema

😁 Very happy about this and looking forward to working with old and new colleagues!!!

Honored (and surprised!) to receive a Philip Leverhulme Prize, but grateful to @leverhulme.ac.uk and @cam-archaeology.bsky.social for their support.

Congratulations to all of the Philip Leverhulme Prize winners - so well deserved!!! 🎉. www.leverhulme.ac.uk/news/2025PLP

Fully-funded 4-year #PhD in Cultural Evolution! Join my @erc.europa.eu project exploring how compression & compositionality drive cultural innovation: hmc-lab.com/ERCPhDCultur...
Apply by Nov 12!
Maybe of interest to folks from #COSMOS2025 or @eslr.bsky.social? Please feel free to share! 🙏

Please join us online or in person for this term's Garrod Seminar Series 'Consumed by time: Past foodways in practice' @cam-archaeology.bsky.social.
We are delighted to have an amazing line up of experts in their field speaking. More details here: talks.cam.ac.uk/show/index/1...

Algeria, Tassili n'Ajjer National Park, Sahara desert, broken neolithic pottery

📣 PUBLISHED OPEN ACCESS 📣

Bayesian analyses of radiocarbon dates suggest multiple origins of ceramic technology in Early Holocene Africa in Nature Communications by Rocco Rotunno & Enrico Crema

👉 www.arch.cam.ac.uk/news/statist...

📸 Westend61

We are hiring a Project Co-ordinator! 🚨

Are you extremely organised with great interpersonal skills?
Able to multitask efficiently?
Interested in African prehistory?
Keen to work with an enthusiastic team?
We want to hear from you!

Closing date: 17 October, 2025

GitHub - roccorot/OriginPotteryNAfrica Contribute to roccorot/OriginPotteryNAfrica development by creating an account on GitHub.

There are other interesting findings (such as the different rates of spatial diffusion) but you can find more about it reading the paper and checking the code :)
github.com/roccorot/Ori...

Our model accounted for the often large measurement errors and accounts for both the presence and absence of the technology to maximise the available information. The results strongly reject the idea of a single origin and provide the strongest support for a triple origin model.

We collated over 300 radiocarbon dates distinguishing contexts with and without ceramics and fitted a series of custom spatio-temporal diffusion models to determine which hypotheses better supported our data.

Bayesian analyses of radiocarbon dates suggest multiple origins of ceramic technology in Early Holocene Africa Nature Communications - Several possible points of origin have been proposed for the spread of ceramic technology in Saharan Africa between 11–10,000 years ago. Here, the authors...

⚠️Paper Alert!⚠️
Excited to share this paper with @roccoro.bsky.social where we examined whether ceramic technology in Saharan Africa was the result of a single or multiple episodes of innovation & diffusion
rdcu.be/eJi3g

PhD Studentship alert!
I'm looking for a motivated student to work here in Vienna @vdsee-univie.bsky.social on my ERC grant "DISPERSE". It's a fulltime scholarship (working in 14C and #archsci in Palaeolithic archaeology in Eurasia.
Details in the link below!
jobs.univie.ac.at/job/Universi...

Extended Call for Papers and Posters – CAA UK 2025 – CAA-UK

The next CAA-UK will be hosted by @cam-archaeology.bsky.social ! Very much looking forward to hearing the latest research from the current and the next generation of computational and quantitative archaeologists (not just from the UK) : uk.caa-international.org/caa-uk-2025-2/ (deadline 29/9/2025)

BTC Call for Action - EAA

EAA reversed its decision to exclude Israeli institutions complicit in the genocide of Palestinians after intimidation campaigns.

Read & share the full statement: blacktrowelcollective.wordpress.com/2025/09/02/b...

I'm pleased to share this new article by @svenkasser.bsky.social, Laura Fortunato @anthrolog.bsky.social, Marc Feldman and myself.

The article extends gene-culture coevolution to recognize evolutionary effects of culture arising through drift and migration.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Behavior drives morphological change during human evolution Dietary shifts and corresponding morphological changes can sometimes evolve in succession, not concurrently—an evolutionary process called behavioral drive. Detecting behavioral drive in the fossil re...

Really cool study looking at how behaviour precedes morphological change across taxa - and implications for human evolution 💀🧪 massive congrats to all the authors, including @vivek123.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Join us!!!

Bronze Age 'culinary traditions' in Japan and Korea explored through lipid analysis

📣 PUBLISHED OPEN ACCESS 📣

Lipid residue analysis reveals divergent culinary practices in Japan and Korea at the dawn of intensive agriculture in @pnas.org

👉 www.arch.cam.ac.uk/news/culinar...

@ercrema.bsky.social

This research was funded by the ERC and JSPS - you can find more papers from our project on the link 👇
www.encounterproject.info

For example, we found no evidence of millet in the residues from Japanese ceramics, in stark contrast to those from Korea (see image below; the brown-coloured dots indicate vessels with millet biomarkers, the blue ones are aquatic biomarkers).

We examined organic residues from pottery in both regions and found substantial differences, with Japanese vessels retaining most of their characteristics even after the introduction of farming.

The diffusion of rice and millet in this region has an interesting story - Millet arrived in the Korean peninsula towards the end of the 5k BCE, but it was not transmitted to the Japanese islands until the 1k BCE, soon after the introduction of rice in Korea and the resulting demographic expansion.

Lipid residue analysis reveals divergent culinary practices in Japan and Korea at the dawn of intensive agriculture | PNAS The dispersal of millet and rice agriculture from Korea to Japan from around 3,000 y ago has been well documented through radiocarbon analysis of b...

Delighted to share the latest paper from the ENCOUNTER project led by Oliver Craig where we examined the divergence of culinary tradition in Japan and Korea around the turn of the 1st millennium BCE, when rice and millet farming were introduced in Japan
doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

Antiquity Prize 2025 awarded to the study of the Oued Beht site in Morocco, co-directed by the CNR | Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche 24/06/2025

Congratulations to the winners of this year's Antiquity Prize! Their research explored the largest agricultural complex yet found in Africa beyond the Nile, uncovering a previously unknown Neolithic society in Morocco 🏺 #Archaeology

www.cnr.it/it/nota-stam...

The paper is published for the special issue ‘Next Generation Archaeological Science’ in the Journal of Archaeological Science; some thought-provoking review articles there, so check it out!

I cover methods that are becoming increasingly common, such as hierarchical models, but also slightly more obscure approaches, such as error-in-variables models and generative inference.

I argue that the field of statistics is perfectly aware of the many problems we lament about, and that solutions have been developed and are being used by some (too few) archaeologists.

I rant about how we often fail to account for sample independence properly, ignore measurement error and missing data, and invoke ‘correlation is not causation’ whilst increasingly detaching our theory from empirical data.

Statistical modelling in archaeology: some recent trends and future perspectives This paper reviews the application of statistical models in archaeology in the last decade, focusing in particular on multilevel models, statistical t…

I'm happy to share this review article, where I attempt to ponder about missed opportunities in archaeological statistical modelling.

Dr Jasmine Vieri awarded Honourable Mention for Emerging Investigator Award

👏 Dr @jasminevieri.bsky.social, Research Associate at the McDonald Institute, has received an Honourable Mention for the 2024 Journal of Archaeological Science (JAS) and Society for Archaeological Sciences (SAS) Emerging Investigator Award.

www.arch.cam.ac.uk/news/jasmine...