The University of Sheffield is moving its 50-year-old collection of archaeological plant and animal remains—tens of thousands of specimens—into the School of Biosciences after the closure of its Archaeology Department, and using this grant to modernise and expand the collection while hiring two part-time technicians to manage it. This matters because bioarchaeology collections are irreplaceable physical records of past human diets, agriculture, and environments. Without proper curation, specimens degrade or become inaccessible, and the closure of the department threatened to scatter or mothball the collection. The project also addresses a national gap: few UK institutions maintain integrated archaeobotany and zooarchaeology reference collections that are openly available to researchers, commercial archaeology units, and the public. If successful, the project will create a stable, accessible resource for studying everything from ancient crop evolution to past climate adaptation. Researchers across the UK—and internationally, through the consortium with Historic England and the University of Aberdeen—will be able to identify plant and animal remains from new excavations more reliably. The public will gain access through open lab days, workshops, and online resources. The collection will also support training for the next generation of bioarchaeologists, helping maintain expertise in a field that quietly underpins heritage management, planning decisions, and our understanding of long-term environmental change.
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SHEFF BIOARCH will improve current bioarchaeology provisions at the University of Sheffield to enhance research quality and guarantee greater accessibility to our collections. Our laboratories have a special focus on the study of plant and animal remains from archaeological sites (archaeobotany and zooarchaeology) and have been at the forefront of world archaeological research for more than 50 years. This has been possible through constant renewal over the years and the RICHeS project will provide us with the opportunity to make yet another step in such a modernisation process. The project is also very timely as it will coincide with our move to the School of Biosciences following the unpopular decision to close the Department of Archaeology. The integration into the new premises will provide the opportunity to rethink our setup, which can be much facilitated by the acquisition of new resources and the development of new initiatives, summarised as follows: the employment of two part-time technicians respectively covering curational work in archaeobotany and zooarchaeology (SUPPORT) the acquisition of additional storage facilities for both collections (ACCESSIBILITY) the acquisition of new specimens for the zooarchaeology reference collection (EXPANSION) the acquisition of new technical devices for the archaeobotany collection (MODERNISATION) the setting up of online facilities and in-person workshops providing information about our collections (DISSEMINATION). A core element of our mission, which we want to emphasise further as part of SHEFF BIOARCH, is to make our collections available to the wider community of students, researchers, and enthusiasts. To do so, we will work at the local scale but also nationally and, to some extent, internationally. For this purpose, we are forming a consortium with the Fort Cumberland Laboratories of Historic England, located near Portsmouth, and the Department of Archaeology of the University of Aberdeen. By working together and forming a partnership of mutual help, we will be in a much stronger position to offer reliable, integrated and long-lasting bioarchaeology provision to research colleagues as well as the general public. The consortium will also have the added advantage of providing mutual training opportunities for our staff (mainly, but not only, the two main technicians) and students. This will also enhance a collaborative ethos, which is today much needed in our research environment. As part of the project, we will have several initiatives to open the doors of the university to the external world aiming to increase public accessibility. This will ensure that any investment associated with RICHeS will have the greatest possible return in terms of intensity of use and will be properly shared beyond our research groups. We will organise short courses, open lab days, workshops and conferences, therefore making sure that the accessibility of our facilities is sufficiently well-known. In doing so, we will have the opportunity to operate in conjunction with the Alfred Denny Museum of Natural Sciences, with which we have already started collaborating. SHEFF BIOARCH will also provide us with the opportunity to consolidate our network of work relationships with a wide range of museums, commercial archaeological units, and community groups, which can all potentially benefit from the use of our collections.
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