Applications are invited for a Research Scientist position as part of the project “First Harvests: untangling climate, chronology and cereal cultivation in Later Neolithic Ireland 3600-2500 BC” in collaboration with the University College Dublin School of Archaeology. The overall aim is to understand the interaction between changing climates and farming strategies in prehistoric Ireland to fill a crucial gap in knowledge about the development of cereal agriculture in Ireland in the centuries after its first introduction in the early fourth millennium BC. The project has three main objectives: 1) to quantify existing archaeobotanical records c.3600-2500 BC and investigate how these records are generated under current archaeological practice; 2) to investigate the relative roles of different cereal crops and cultivation methods c. 3600-2500 BC, and 3) to interrogate the connection between these archaeobotanical records and climate proxy records. This Research Scientist role will focus on the latter objective, as part of an international interdisciplinary team (PI: Assoc. Prof. Jessica Smyth; Co-PI: Prof. Frank McDermott). The Research Scientist will be responsible for conducting U-series dating of mid- to late-Holocene speleothems from Ireland, using existing collections and focusing specifically on the period c. 5,600-4,500 years before present. The Research Scientist will also undertake stable isotope and laser-ablation trace element analyses on selected speleothems to identify seasonal cycles in trace element concentrations, with a view to reconstructing changes in palaeo-seasonality before, during and after the targeted Neolithic interval.

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