Over the past century, leading UK researchers working under the auspices of the British School at Athens (BSA), British Institute at Ankara (BIAA) and British School at Rome (BSR) - members of the British International Research Institutes (BIRI) - have generated heritage science collections - archaeological ceramic, lithic and botanical samples and geological reference collections - of international significance for addressing big-picture questions concerning the human past in the Mediterranean. These collections have substantial research value from ancient technologies and economies to innovation and societal change, with unparalleled value for investigating mobility of objects, raw materials and humans. Newcastle University works closely with the BIRI and has an international reputation for research in heritage science especially in artefacts and archaeological archives as well as substantial expertise in collections management. Of particular interest to Newcastle, 50-years of scientific study of Mediterranean ceramics at the BSA has created a collection of unrealised potential. These fundamental collections, however, remain inaccessible to most researchers. The BIRI Collections represent an ideal model for building a versatile and powerful heritage science collections management system. Underpinning and contextualising these data are significant related excavation and ethnography archives. Our collaborative programme will address the need for a heritage science collection management system and related digital infrastructure by focusing on a meaningful subset of BIRI collections laying the groundwork for future expansion. Using new technologies (set to international standards), we will build infrastructure to transform the potential of these unparalleled heritage science resources for international researchers and the public serving two key purposes: 1. To make primary data freely accessible. Providing access to this infrastructure will enable researchers to explore inherent, meaningful spatio-temporal networks of information in diverse collections, so that they can explore and analyse relationships between objects, people and places. 2. To enable the combination of collections and the creation of thematic stories through custom web themes, available for public and educational programs from school children to post-doctoral researchers. The data and the technology have been selected to ensure a meaningful research resource and a proof of concept for compatible expansion. Requirements for infrastructure include: Standards-based, findable and accessible to humans and machines, enabling research potential for humanities and social sciences including the use of machine learning to characterise digital images (e.g. of material thin sections). Cultural heritage aggregators will be able to consume linked open data published by the infrastructure. Remote access will include browsable catalogues of downloadable data as well as custom web themes that bring public education value through engaging storytelling. Tools that enable collaborating organisations to add data to websites sustainably without requiring ongoing IT development; facilitating collaborative research.

Nahrein is the Arabic word for Mesopotamia - the ancient "land between two rivers", centred on modern-day Iraq and northern Syria. The literate, urban cultures of Sumer, Babylonia and Assyria together represent the vital first half of history, millennia before Greece and Rome. Yet they are also a new antiquity, rediscovered archaeologically in the 19th and 20th centuries, irrevocably entangled in the region's messy politics of colonialism and dictatorship, and now threatened by the conflicts tearing the region apart. Millions of dollars of international aid are being pumped into the documentation, digitisation and conservation of threatened and war-damaged cultural heritage sites across the Middle East, with little thought for local interests and impacts. The Nahrein Network by contrast will enable local people to reclaim this heritage as local history, and to put it to constructive use for local communities and economies. It aims to harness interdisciplinary humanities research and education to help Middle Eastern universities, museums, archives and cultural heritage sites build their capacity to contribute to their countries' economic, cultural and social development in the years ahead. The wars in Iraq and Syria spread their deadly effects far beyond the immediate conflict zones. But much-needed emergency relief should not be at the expense of planning for longer-term economic and social regrowth. Network partner UNESCO Iraq identifies education and culture as two key Areas of Action, with gender equality and academic isolation as of particular concern, while UNAMI aims to aid social reconciliation though cultural dialogue. Centred initially on southern Iraq and Kurdistan, Nahrein will run a Research Centre directed by Dr Saad Eskander at the University of Kurdistan Hewler (Erbil) and two collaborative hubs at the University of Baghdad and Basrah Museum. In year 3 it will expand into Turkey, Lebanon and--if safe--Syria and Iran with help from the British Institute at Ankara, the Council for British Research in the Levant and, we hope, the British Institute of Persian Studies. With support from the British Institute for the Study of Iraq, in Strand 1 we will welcome humanities educators and researchers back into the international fold by offering varied options for international, interdisciplinary collaboration, training, mentoring and peer-group support, especially for women, minorities, and early career researchers. In Strand 2 we will issue six-monthly funding calls for interdisciplinary, collaborative projects open to academics, cultural heritage professionals, NGOs and community groups. Each call will address a different selection of five overall themes, related to the core team's own research, chosen to address the Network's five primary Aims (see Objectives). This sequencing will allow research projects to learn from and build on prior findings, and enable Network participants to respond flexibly to new developments in the region. We aim to strike a balance between providing appropriate support and expertise from the project team and allowing Network participants to take the lead on their own research and development. We will encourage a wide range of traditional and innovative methodologies and outputs, both theoretical and practice-based. However, the emphasis will be on open-access, peer-reviewed online publication, for instance via UCL Press and the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus (oracc.org). In this way we will maximise accessibility of the Network's findings while providing authors and readers with the reassurance of high academic quality. In Strand 3 we will set up five working groups, one for each Aim, to evaluate, share and embed good practice, and make policy recommendations across the network's full geographical range. With partners we will secure funding to develop a sustainable new generation of high quality humanities research in and for the benefit of the wider Middle East.

There are concerns that in the future changes in climate might increase the spread of diseases and threaten human health. For example, a warmer and wetter climate could lead to disease-carrying creatures which thrive in warm, moist environments spreading to new regions. However, detecting changes such as these is challenging because climate is only one of several factors which affect the prevalence of disease at the present day; (other factors include immunisation programmes, easier transport of infected humans, etc...). An alternative approach to understanding the relationship between climate change and disease is to set up "experiments" using past disease outbreaks where the outcome in terms of infection and mortality is already known. One such is the Plague of Justinian. This, the first known global pandemic struck in AD451 and recurred until ~AD750, leading to the premature death of up to a quarter of the human population in the eastern Mediterranean region. Another strain of bubonic plague later caused the Medieval Black Death. This project will examine the changes in climate that took place at the same time as the Plague of Justinian. We will do this using evidence of past climate preserved in lake muds. Until recently, climatic evidence from the Mediterranean region for this time period has not been very precisely dated or detailed in time. However, the muds at the bottom of Nar lake in central Turkey are annually-banded, similar to tree rings, which offers the chance to reconstruct year-by-year variations in climate. So far, sediment core samples from Nar have been analysed at 5 to 20 year time intervals, and they show that the onset of the plague seems to have coincided with a very large switch from a drier to a wetter climate. Similarly, the Justinian plague era came to the end around AD750, when the climate became drier once again. The wetter climate would have increased the numbers of rats and other rodents which carry fleas, which in turn carry the plague bacterium. In order to test this idea more rigorously, we aim to measure climatic indicators in our cores for each individual annual layer during the critical time period around the start and end of the plague. We will use chemical isotopes, chemical element composition and other changes in the sediment layers to reconstruct how fast the climate changed and whether there was any lag between this and spread of the disease. The sediment cores can also tell us, indirectly, about the consequences of the plague for rural agriculture, via the different types of pollen that are preserved. We will analyse pollen for adjacent 3-year samples of banded mud (the minimum that is practicable) to see if the reduction in human population also led to a fall in the proportion of pollen from crop plants, such as cereals and fruit trees. Finally, we will compare our results with information from historical texts which record the date and place of plague outbreaks, to see how well they match up.