The first archaeological excavations campaign will take place in July 2019 in Romania. The team will investigate a badly mangled burial mound from the locality of Boldeşti-Grădiştea (Prahova County), in partnership with the Prahova County Museum of History and Archaeology. The excavation is coupled with various remote sensing activities, including large-scale magnetometer surveys, also of other sites, for gaining further data about kurgans, their burials and environs. Our geo- and environmental sciences team will also be carrying out various fieldwork activities.

The palaoeclimatologists involved in the project will make two trips to South Eastern Europe in 2019. We will first make a prospecting trip in May to look for suitable fieldwork sites in Romania. During this trip we will select the sites which will be sampled during the longer summer fieldwork in July. Our fieldwork will focus on using various types of sediment samplers to retrieve sediment cores from the bottom of selected lakes. These cores are supposed to cover the whole Holocene (ie. about the last 12,000 years) and they will be later analyzed for pollen, biomarkers and other palaeoclimatic proxies. Our aim is to sample one lake from higher altitudes (over 1500 m) and one from the lowlands (altitude under 500 m).