The Palaeoecology and sedaDNA of Ancient Ports

​​Port harbours are the umbilical cords of civilisations providing unique windows on population, diet/health, technology and environmental change. Silted-up harbours also provide an archive of pollen and DNA. PortGEN will explore this potential using sediments already collected from some of the largest ancient harbours and smaller sites in the UK.​ 

This studentship will provide the essential qualifications in palaeoecology and sedaDNA that is now highly sort after in many areas of research and also industry. Both and especially the sedaDNA approach are growing fields in not only archaeology but ecology and environmental sciences. The areas of research will include some fieldwork in the UK and France, laboratory extraction of both pollen and sedaDNA, required bioinformatics and data analysis. This will all be undertaken in a joint Southampton-Tromsø lab within a research environment will many other students doing similar projects. This project (PortGEN) applies these methodologies to ancient port harbours because they are the umbilical cords of civilizations uniting land and sea and can provide a unique ‘window’ on population, diet/health, technology and environmental change. Being the lifeblood of complex societies ports can reveal how society adapted to changing environmental conditions from disease to floods. So far, the ‘past of ports’ has been explored using archaeology, texts, plant/animal remains (seeds and bones), microfossils (e.g. pollen) and geochemistry. Since the discovery that extra-cellular ancient DNA can be preserved in sediments 20 years ago it has been used in lakes, estuaries, floodplains, soils and marine sediments. Recent research outside archaeology has shown that shallow-marine sediments can retain DNA for thousands of years as so-called ancient sedimentary DNA (sedaDNA). This variety of sediment types implies that the sedimentary traps of ancient port harbours would hold DNA well, and above the 10oC mean annual temperature isotherm