Atlantic Europe in the Metal Ages (AEMA): Questions of Shared Language

An AHRC grant of £689,167 has enabled the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies to begin this three-year project. Led by Principal Investigator (Project Leader) Professor John T. Koch at CAWCS, with Co-Investigators Professor Barry Cunliffe (University of Oxford), Professor Raimund Karl (Bangor University), and Paul Vetch (King's College London), this project will bring together, and make available and comparable, rapidly expanding archaeological and linguistic evidence from Wales, the UK, and the other countries of Europe's Atlantic facade. The team includes Dr Catriona Gibson, an expert in the Iberian Bronze Age, Dr Fernando Fernandez, a philologist from Spain, and Dr Kerri Cleary, an archaeologist from Ireland. 

As well as an interactive website displaying the archaeological and linguistic information on scalable maps, the project will produce new overviews of the Copper and Bronze Age in Iberia and Ireland and a series of multi-authored multidisciplinary books. A Welsh overview, Hen Fyd Iwerydd, will be launched at the National Eisteddfod. 

The Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London, led by Co-Investigator Paul Vetch, will be responsible for creating the digital platform for the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) database and project website.

The National Library of Wales involvement with the project will be to host and maintain the project website, continuing at least three years beyond the completion of research under the AHRC grant in 2016.