Angela Trentacoste, the PJ Smith Senior Fellow in Archaeology at the BSR, has been awarded a prestigious ERC Consolidator grant for her project FEROCI – Feeding Roman Italy: Continuities and Innovations in animal production from urbanisation to empire.

FEROCI was awarded €2 million in funding over 5 years to investigate agro-pastoral production in Italy over a dynamic period of urbanisation and political expansion c. 600 BC–AD 200. FEROCI will create an entirely new line of evidence on farming practices, using state-of-the-art methods to unlock previously inaccessible insights from animal bones and teeth.  Integrated with current research into Italian landscape and agriculture, the project aims to redefine understandings of the agro-pastoral systems at the foundation of ancient society, and how shifts in their organisation shaped economic growth and the motivations for territorial expansion. In doing so, the project will create new insights into socio-ecological interactions across a crucial period of economic and demographic growth from urbanisation to nascent empire, and create widely re-usable data directly relevant to questions of human-mediated environmental change over the longue durée.

The BSR is a fundamental collaborator on the project, which will expand the BSR’s tradition of research in urban, landscape, and environmental archaeology.