Dr Mike Charles
Telephone: 0114 22 22923
E-Mail: M.P.Charles@Sheffield.ac.uk
Dr M Charles is a Reader in Environmental Archaeology. His research interests include palaeoethnobotany in south-west Asia and he has conducted field projects in Turkmenistan, Jordan and Spain.
Current research projects
- Turkmenistan the project aims to achieve a greater understanding of past human-environmental interactions, the changing landscape, the cultural impacts and the implications of this heritage for the future development of western Turkmenistan. The project is carried out collaboratively with, University of Oxford, the Sheffield Centre for Dry-land Research and the University of York.
- Tell Brak, Syria Tell Brak is a large bronze age site in northern Syria that has been excavated throughout the 20th century. Project director is Professor G. Emberling from the Metropolitan Museum of Art (USA). Current excavations will concentrate on the Uruk/4th millennium sequence at the site.
- The ecology of present day husbandry The results of present-day ecological surveys of weed floras in northern Europe and the Mediterranean are now the subject of a 3-year NERC-funded research project, started in January 1995, in collaboration with the NERC Unit of Comparative Plant Ecology (UCPE), Sheffield. The aim of this project is to develop a suite of 'functional attributes' (as defined by the UCPE) for weed species, which will help to characterise different crop husbandry practices and so assist in the interpretation of archaeobotanical assemblages (with Glynis Jones).
Research Supervision
We would be interested in applications from prospective PhD candidates for the following projects.
Integrating the Evidence for the Spread of Cereal Agriculture in Europe
The aim of this project is to model the spread of cereal crops through Europe in relation to geographic parameters. The project involves the measurement of multivariate morphological traits (mostly of cereal chaff) through image analysis software programmes, and the mapping of these in relation to topographic, edaphic and climatic variables in GIS, to establish the role of local carrying capacity in the spread of agriculture. Archaeobotanical compositional data and radiocarbon dates based on cereal remains will also become available during the course of the project, and can be mapped alongside the morphological and geographic variables, in collaboration with the Department of Probability and Statistics.
Exploring the Evolutionary Process of Cereal and Pulse Domestication through functional and ecological analysis
This project will approach the process of cereal and pulse domestication by exploring the functional attributes (e.g. ability to form a seed bank, specific leaf area) related to tillage, harvesting, palatibility/predator defence and growing conditions in European and Near Eastern grasses and legumes. The interactions between these attributes will be analysed and the functional differences between domesticated cereals and pulses, their wild progenitors and wild grasses and legumes will be examined to determine the evolutionary parameters governing this process. This will be backed up by experimental work on ecological characteristics (e.g. growth rate, water-use efficiency), and will be jointly supervised by staff in the Departments of Archaeology and Animal and Plant Science.
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