Bristol Anthropology and Archaeology Research Seminars (BAARS)

Bristol Anthropology and Archaeology Research Seminars (BAARS) is a weekly seminar series hosted by our department, where we invite academic staff and lecturers across the four fields of anthropology to present their current and ongoing research.

Each talk is followed by a Q&A.

Seminars take place every Wednesday during term time from 13.00-15.00.
Location: G10, Department for Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Bristol
43, Woodland Road, BS8 1UU, ground floor.

Access information: https://www.accessable.co.uk/university-of-bristol/access-guides/43-woodland-road

All welcome!

Convener: Helen Fewlass (Lecturer in Archaeology)

Winter - Spring (TB2) 2026, Wednesdays 1.00-3.00pm*

Date	Speaker	Title & Abstract
Wed 14th Jan	Alice Roberts, University of Birmingham	Book tour: Domination - This is the story of the fall of an Empire - and the rise of another ‘As the Roman Empire crumbled in Western Europe, a shadow of power remained, almost perfectly mapping onto its disappearing territories. And then, it continued to spread. Unearthing the archaeological clues and challenging long-established histories, Domination tells a remarkable story about the relationship between the Roman Empire and Christianity. Who spread Christianity, how, and why? In her quest to find the answer, Professor Alice Roberts takes us on a gripping investigative journey. From a secluded valley in south Wales to the shores of Brittany; from the heart of the Roman Empire in a time of political turmoil to the ancient city of Corinth in the footsteps of the apostle Paul; from Alexandria in the fourth century to Constantinople. Lifting the veil on secrets that have been hidden in plain sight, this is a pageturning exploration of power and its survival.’
Wed 28th Jan *12:00-15:30	Francesco Fulminate, University of Bristol, and others	Beyond binary: navigating the spectrum of gender in the Past to disseminate EDIB in the Present Bringing together Academics, Policy Maker Consultants, Schools, Students, LGBTQIA+ communities this inter-disciplinary workshop will challenge current gender stereotypes existing in the past and present. We travel from 1st Millennium BC Italy to communities in Amazonia, to our own communities here in Bristol and we will show how the distance inherent to the past or to far away populations can help us raise awareness and discuss complex issues to inform better policies in the present. Recent scholarship shows that past societies were not so binary as previously thought and that women both from the past and present indigenous societies might have taken leader roles more often than the general narrative tend to suggest. Comparing the past to the present provides a useful social laboratory in which to test past evolutions, developments and trends to predict also potential future scenarios. The workshop also includes a quick exploration of contemporary LGBTQIA+ communities’ relationships with queer history. Steven Bradley and Helen Mccollen highlight their insights and responses while developing the Bristol Museum & Art Gallery exhibition Gender Stories. The above findings and the workshop discussion will show the importance of intersectional identity, and particularly gender, in creating and shaping communities and can help modern policy makers to take more informed decisions on gender issues and more general communities’ welfare and wellbeing. This workshop will also be the starting point for creating a community to further these ideas more widely and more broadly, including major fundings applications.
Wed 4th Feb	Bryony Rogers, University of Bristol	Did the Bronze Age Cows come home? Strontium isotopes can be used to reconstruct animal mobility in the past to investigate farming, trade and animal management strategies. This talk will present some of the strontium isotope data from the Animals and Society in Bronze Age Europe (ANSOC) project including sites from Cambridge, Wiltshire and Kent; as well as from West Frisia in the Netherlands. These sites range in date from the early to late Bronze Age. Animals in the past are often thought of in purely economic contexts, but the ANSOC project hopes to explore relationships between humans and animals and the latter’s active role in society.
Wed 11th Feb	Antonella Mazzone, University of Bristol	‘Humidity is a sloth’ – Thermal ontologies of the Upper Rio Negro In this talk, I present early findings from collaborative research co-produced with Tukano, Baré and Baniwa colleagues in the Brazilian Amazon. Through virtual graphic ethnography, the research intended to understand local perception of climate change and how riverside peoples of the Upper Rio Negro (Baré, Tukano and Baniwa) co-sense temperature change through encounters with more-than- human beings. Rather than treating temperature as a private bodily state, it emerged that thermal ontologies are grounded in animal and atmospheric signals: for Baré speakers, strong summer/heat is indexed by a besouro that “saws” large vacú branches; Tukano accounts figure cold as descending humidity, iconised by the sloth and narrated through the cosmological histories of two fishermen (white = airborne humidity; black = impending rain). Everyday practices amplify these readings: cicadas sing as hot air approaches; frogs herald rain and coolness. Collaborative drawings, maps, ecological calendars, and comics strips have been co-designed together with Tukano, Baré, and Baniwa collaborators. These early findings are presented under community agreements; intellectual authority and decision-making rest with Tukano and Baniwa and Baré knowledge-holders.
Wed 18th Feb	Abigail Page, Brunel University	Beyond the mother: evolutionary perspectives on cooperative childrearing Human childrearing is undeniably cooperative: mothers do not and cannot raise children alone. Yet, who provides childcare - and why - varies substantially across societies, and we have little theoretical framework to understand this diversity. In this talk, Dr Abigail Page draws on extensive observational and demographic data from the Agta, a hunter-gatherer population in the Philippines, to explore how cooperative childrearing is shaped by ecology, settlement patterns and demography. Using over 200,000 behavioural observations of young children, the research reveals large and diverse childcare networks in which mothers remain key caregivers but allomothers - including fathers, siblings, distant kin and non-kin - contribute substantially. However, childcare is not uniform even within this small society - contrasts emerge between mobile and settled Agta camps, with settlement linked to shifts in grandmaternal involvement, maternal workloads and even childhood mortality. This suggests cooperative childrearing is a flexible practice which adjusts to local ecology and demographic changes. In particular, this talk will argue that we can better understand grandmothering within the context of reproductive timing. In the Agta, grandmothers’ availability and investment are constrained by mortality, fertility timing and the number of dependents they themselves support. These demographic pressures help explain why grandmaternal care is highly beneficial in some contexts but limited in others. Together, these findings highlight how cooperation in childrearing varies within populations and emphasise the need for integrated evolutionary, anthropological and demographic approaches to understand the diversity of human social support.
Wed 4th March	Juan Zhang, University of Bristol	TBC
Wed 11th March	Flint Dibble, University of Cardiff	Engaging with Fake Archaeology: Strategies and Impacts from the Trenches Over the last few decades, pseudoarchaeology has dramatically increased in popularity. While it might seem easy to laugh off and ignore, as these claims are widely divorced from the reality of our lived experience as archaeologists, the savvy tactics used by pseudoscientist influencers means that misinformation has a real cost on the field of archaeology and its stakeholders. Pseudoarchaeologists have an outsized impact on the public perception of our field, with best-selling books in the archaeology section, top TV shows and online videos, and major media headlines. These impacts have had a knock-on effect on excavations, heritage management, and the antiquities market across the world. Due to the increasing frequency of these negative impacts, we must become informed and respond in an effective manner. In this paper, I critically examine my own journey in high-profile engagement with pseudoarchaeology, from Joe Rogan and newspaper headlines to Twitter and YouTube. Drawing upon up-to-date misinformation research, I present effective strategies for engaging with the media and on social media, addressing the dangers and benefits of public engagement. The conclusion is clear: we have to engage. But in a strategic manner.
Wed 18th March	Kelly Fagan Robinson, University of Cambridge	TBC
Wed 15th April	Fiona Jordan, University of Bristol	Materia Medica Pasifika: continuity and change in Polynesian plants used for medicine Modern migrants using plants to meet their health needs are known to conserve traditional knowledge, but also to innovate to adapt to their new environment. What about in the past? The voyage into Polynesia is amongst the most remarkable of human migrations, resulting in the peopling of isolated archipelagos from c. 3500ya. We use this context to determine the role for adaptation in plant-based healthcare at pre- and historic timescales. Our dataset of Oceanic ethnobotanical knowledge includes recognition of traditional and indigenous knowledge-holders, in an effort to raise their visibility in cross-cultural analyses. Testing the extent to which the new floristic environments encountered, cultural ancestry, or geographic proximity predict the composition of ethnopharmacopoeias, we reveal adaptation to new floristic environments across 20 Oceanic ethnolinguistic groups.
Wed 22nd April	Rob Dinnis, University of Aberdeen	Wogan Cavern: why it’s so important, and what we’re up to next Relative to neighbouring regions, the British archaeological record of the last glacial cycle is extremely poor. We know that late Neanderthals and then Homo sapiens occupied parts of what is today England and Wales, but beyond that little is clear. The main reason is the thorough excavation of cave sites in the 19th and early 20th centuries, leaving little for modern-day research. Recent excavations at Wogan Cavern have identified a significant volume of intact archaeological deposits from the period, and pilot studies have shown that modern archaeological methods can be applied to the site. A new period of fieldwork is therefore set to begin in 2026. Here, the problems with British evidence for late Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens is outlined. The work to date at Wogan Cavern is described, and the plan for the coming years is explained.