Evidence from Britain and Ireland between 3500-2000 BC (the late Neolithic and Chalcolithic) makes this one of the most important periods in prehistory. During this time, we see spectacular Grooved Ware and Beaker pottery, metallurgy, carved mace heads, and use of some of Europe's most iconic sites such as Newgrange and Stonehenge. Recent ancient DNA data (suggesting almost complete population replacement at the end of the period) and dietary stable isotopes (indicating movement of people and animals over previously unsuspected distances) suggest that there is still much to learn. These new data challenge and reinvigorate older debates in terms of growing social hierarchies, ethnicity, religious organisation, and identity. However, these data have not been matched by developments in our chronologies; such fine-grained evidence requires equally sophisticated and specific chronologies in order to understand these changes. While previously prehistorians had to rely for their chronological structure on typologies of sites and things, we now have the ability to produce very precise, probabilistic, independent chronologies using Bayesian statistical analyses (e.g. Bronk Ramsey 2009; Bayliss 2009). Bayesian analysis has provided precise chronologies for individual sites (e.g. Whittle 2018) or activity at types of site (e.g 'Neolithic burials'; Whitehouse et al. 2014), which were previously understood at the scale of several centuries. It allows a coherent way to compare scientific chronologies, and applications to earlier Neolithic sites (e.g. Whittle et al. 2011) have had international significance in the ways archaeologists approach scientific dating as a whole. While we have had excellent examples of scientific chronologies for individual late Neolithic and Chalcolithic sites or things (see below), no attempt has been made to write a synthetic history of the dramatic changes of late 4th and 3rd millennia Ireland and Britain using accurate and detailed chronology. Moreover, 'simply' increasing chronological precision on its own is not enough. To fully achieve the potential of the Bayesian 'revolution' (cf. Bayliss 2009; Bronk Ramsey 2009; Griffiths 2017), we need both an independent chronological framework, and an approach to 'prehistory' that moves beyond ever more precise chronologies for sites or sequences. We need narratives that can synthesise and interpret evidence from across 'packages' that archaeologists recognise as significant - such as the late Neolithic and Chalcolithic - and use precisely defined time-scales as the basis for discussing changes in practices, things and places produced by people in historically-specific times. Chapman (2018) has recently called this the 'central challenge' in order to write 'a new kind of archaeology', while Whittle (2018, 248) argues that the 'pre- must come out of prehistory'. This project will do just that. We will build on previous approaches, producing site-specific chronological models for all evidence from Britain and Ireland from 3500-2000 BC, while generating a significant legacy of new data, in order to use time - expressed in centuries and decades - as the basis for our new narrative structure. We will make all data, analytical programs and outputs open access, meaning it will be possible to adapt and revise our chronologies in future research. This project's significance will therefore lie not just in our methods, or our routine chronological precision for 1500 years of Irish and British history, or our commitment to open access, but also in our new approaches to writing narratives of 'prehistory' in the future.

Languages are currently valued mainly as practical tools for basic transactions in monoglot contexts. Yet language use is a creative act. Languages evolve in interaction with the needs of individuals who acquire and shape their linguistic resources in interaction with multiple intersecting communities. They change and mingle as cultural constellations shift, and they rapidly turn new technical possibilities into communicative innovations. The crisis of Modern Foreign Languages in UK schools, with its serious consequences for higher education, business, and diplomacy, has its roots in globalisation, the expansion of English as global lingua franca, and diversifying electronic media dominated by English. Arguably it also marks the failure of UK policy-makers and the educational sectors to address these challenges with the necessary understanding, imagination, and unity of purpose. This programme exploits the crisis as an opportunity to engage stakeholders in a collaborative process of rethinking the identity of Modern Languages from the ground up. It will seek to dismantle assumed oppositions between 'vocational' and 'academic' purposes, and develop a concept of languages that responds to the multi-faceted needs of individuals and communities in the contemporary world. Researchers from Oxford, Cambridge, Manchester, Reading, SOAS (London), and Pittsburgh will pool their expertise in some 40 languages to unlock the subject's creative and connective potential by investigating how languages and creativity interact in processes involving more than one language. Research in seven interlocking strands will analyse how we turn thoughts into language-specific metaphors (strand 1), deploy the resources offered by our language to name the elements of our environment (strand 2), and negotiate language 'barriers' to intelligibility across related languages (strand 3). They will seek to capture the creative stimulus generated by multilingual theatre and music (strand 4), identify the creative processes initiated by multilingual literature (strand 5), and explore the creation of multiple meanings in the act of translation (strand 6). Empirical research will compare functional and creative methodologies in language learning and establish benefits of creative activities for the literacy, motivation, and confidence that are key factors in take-up and progression (strand 7). In order to understand multilingual creativity, we need to engage with a variety of contexts and exchange knowledge with practitioners. Partners from beyond academia will contribute to focus groups, workshops, conferences and specialised projects. To take just a few examples, the British Council will enhance opportunities for engagement with policy-makers and involve learners across the world. Work on community languages within the UK will be augmented by a window onto linguistic communities across over 120 countries opened up by BirdLife International. Collaboration with Sputnik Theatre Company, Punch Records, the Ashmolean Museum and cultural festivals will facilitate cross-language projects with actors and musicians, an exhibition, a 'Linguamania' celebration and a Multilingual Music Fest for primary school children. English PEN will provide opportunities to find out about multilingual experiments by creative writers. Meanwhile language experts from GCHQ and ING Media will give insights into the creative language skills used in intelligence and PR. Teachers and learners in schools will interact with the research throughout, culminating in an interactive schools Roadshow. The programme will transform research in Modern Languages by invigorating the subject from the grass-roots up to blue-sky research. By putting creativity at the heart of languages, it will reconnect languages with the arts and humanities while allowing their innovative force to become productive across disciplines and communities.

'The Stuart Successions: fresh approaches to the understanding of seventeenth-century history and literature' has been developed out of, and would immediately follow, the AHRC-funded 'Stuart Successions Project'. In this project we explored a category of writing which has long been recognized but never well understood. Each of the six Stuart successions (James I in 1603, Charles I in 1625, Charles II in 1660, James II in 1688, William III and Mary II in 1688-89, Anne in 1702) generated a wealth of publications. So did the accession to the role of Lord Protector by Oliver Cromwell in 1653, and that of his son Richard in 1658. Succession literature includes a range of elegies on the old monarch and panegyrics on the new; indeed most of the greatest poets of the day felt the need to participate in this activity, some on successive moments of transition. Other kinds of succession literature include histories, genealogies, sermons, satires, news-reports and political tracts. Through surveying and analyzing this material we have been able to throw fresh light on particular moments of transition and also on processes of change across this turbulent period of British history. Our outputs include a database of succession writing, a major volume of essays, and an anthology of primary texts. As this research has demonstrated to us, however, Stuart succession literature holds more than merely academic interest. The Stuart era is widely recognized as a pivotal one in the development of British political and cultural life; it has an established place in the media and the cultural sector (e.g. museums), and recent reforms to school curricula, in History and English Literature, are according it increasing prominence. This is hardly surprising given the achievements and events of the period: Shakespeare was a Stuart for half of his working life; others to shape this century include Milton, Hobbes and Behn. The Stuart era included the greatest British civil war, an unprecedented experiment with republicanism, and eventually the founding of Great Britain itself. The topic of succession, meanwhile, is today pressing itself increasingly upon the public consciousness, as journalists and playwrights, among others, are already speculating about the impact of a third Caroline reign. In this context, we identify four user-communities with which our follow-on project will engage: secondary schoolchildren and their teachers; our partner organizations, united by their commitment to education about the past; media programme-makers; and the general public. We propose a focused and collaborative project involving all three members of the current project team and four major partners: the Ashmolean Museum, the Bodleian Library, the Historical Association and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. It will be supported by Historyworks, a company committed to bringing academic research into the public domain in professional, creative and effective ways. We will select items drawn from the collections of partners, and work collaboratively to develop for each one a range of original interpretative materials. Among other outputs, we will produce: a bespoke website; learning materials (including lesson plans); a series of c.20 vodcasts (short documentary-style audio talks illustrated with still photographic images, suitable for publication via a website as well as for use by our partners); a one-day 'Shakespeare and the Stuarts' workshop for A-Level English and International Baccalaureate students; a 'Stuart Successions and Seventeenth-Century History' study day for secondary teachers; and treatments for radio and television programmes. The project is designed to combine quality impact directed at specified audiences with a commitment also to reach a much wider range of potentially interested parties. It also balances a focus on particular events with an interest in providing resources that will be of use across a longer period.

The art market and its practices has attracted increasing attention from academics in recent years, it also continues to fascinate the general public. Within the broader structures of the art market 'antiques' remains an immensely popular subject, with TV programmes such as the 'Antiques Roadshow' regularly in the top viewing figures and one cannot ignore the scores of other programmes from 'Bargain Hunt' to 'Lovejoy' that reveal, and mythologise, the practices of the antique trade and the figure of the antique dealer. And yet the history of the antique trade, an awareness of its practices, and a clear understanding of the role of the antique trade in the complex and shifting landscape of our fascination with antiques remains an obscure and little understood cultural phenomenon. In the museum world, the history of antique dealers in the biography of museum objects has often been supressed or dislocated from the interpretation of museum objects in the public domain. The proposed 'Year of the Dealer' project aims to direct renewed attention to the history of the antique trade in the development of public museums and the significance of the antique trade in British cultural life. The project is based on the AHRC research project 'Antique Dealers: the British Antique Trade in the 20th century, a cultural geography' (2013-2016) and draws on the rich research resources that the project assembled, including 36 oral history interviews (more than 100 hours of archive), 8 major dealer archives and an active community of more than 30 volunteers working on data input into the project websites and on cataloguing and conservation of dealer archives. The 'Year of the Dealer' aims to co-produce innovative museum interpretation materials, to engage stakeholders in the themes that have emerged as a result of the research project and to disseminate and embed key research findings in the wider public domain. We aim to reveal the potential for new and previously hidden stories to be told about world-renowned and familiar museum objects and to demonstrate the potential for the adoption of the new narratives in public museum interpretation on a national and international scale. Over the course of one year the project team and the well established community of project volunteers will work in collaboration with 6 national and regional museums (The V&A, National Museum, Scotland, The Ashmolean Museum, The Lady Lever Art Gallery, The Bowes Museum, and Temple Newsam), a university art gallery, a community theatre and a leading antique dealer business to deliver an innovative programme of museum interpretation interventions, exhibitions, workshops and public events, training workshops and a high profile theatre performance. The project outcomes will include 6 individual 'hidden history' trails of up to 20 objects in the collections of major museum partners; a series of 4 individually designed workshops based on key questions that have emerged on the relationships between museums and the art market, co-produced with museum partners; a series of 3 public engagement 'In Conversation' events at 3 of the partner museums; staff and volunteer training workshops at each partner museum; a small-scale 3 month exhibition reuniting dealer archives with museum objects and an associated archives workshop; a high-profile, public performance of the play 'Quinneys', led by student actors and directed by a leading academic in theatre directing; an associated participatory workshop, led by a leading academic in theatre and performance; both play and workshop foreground themes of which are central to the construction of the social and cultural identity of the antique dealer. This rich series of activities, managed and disseminated through a dedicated project website, aims to facilitate a permanent shift in the potential for new interpretations of public museum objects and engage a variety of stakeholders and the public in the results of the research project