Cluster of Excellence ROOTS

The Cluster of Excellence ROOTS - Social, Environmental, and Cultural Connectivity in Past Societies explores the roots of social, environmental, and cultural phenomena and processes that substantially marked past human development. In a broad interdisciplinary conceptual framework, we investigate archaeological and historical ‘laboratories’ under the basic assumption that humans and environments have deeply shaped each other, creating socio-environmental connectivities which still persist today. A better understanding of interwoven past socio-environmental dynamics will shed light on the ‘roots’ of current challenges and crises under diverse economic, ecological, and social conditions.

 

  Read more about the Cluster of Excellence ROOTS

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News

Auditorium with word cloud on the wall.

Kiel Conference ends with an appeal for scientific freedom and democracy

More than 350 researchers from 40 countries spent five days discussing the latest findings on human-environmental interconnections in the past.

 
Portrait Stukenbrock

ROOTS-PI Eva Stukenbrock appointed Max Planck Fellow again

Max Planck Society honours Professor for Environmental Genomics for her successful commitment to the cooperation between Kiel University and the MPI for Evolutionary Biology.

 
[EN]

Johanna Mestorf Academy honours research on the relationship between humans and the environment

Jo Sindre P. Eidshaug (Trondheim, Norway) and Li Tang (Jena, Germany) share the Johanna Mestorf Award 2025 for outstanding dissertations in the field of socio-ecological research and landscape archaeology. 

 
A full lecture hall.

Kiel Conference 2025: The Past as a Guiding Aid

350 researchers and students from 30 nations will discuss the latest findings on the links between society, environment and culture since the Stone Age.

 

Events

How the father of historiography saw Egypt and its deities | extended until the end of June

ROOTS contributes to the first event of the Kiel Science Summer

*not open to the public

Book launch of the contributions to the conference "The Poetics of Things Past. Transmission of Knowledge in Verse from Antiquity to Early Modern…

*not open to the public

More events

All upcoming events as well as the event archive of the Cluster of Excellence ROOTS can be found in the Events section.