Centuries-long societal relations uniting Euro-African territories have modulated the forest history. Grazing and use of wood as an essential material have led to overexploitation of woodlands with lagged environmental problems like deforestation, severe flooding, encroaching deserts and declining ecosystems productivity. These human-environment interactions are well presented in the centre of these linkages, the Strait of Gibraltar, where the legacy of such history has survived in millennial forests and timber in archaeological sites or historical buildings. The project's objectives are: 1) to characterize historical exploitation of forests and its relation with the past forest dynamics using dendrochronology in ancient Andalusian and Moroccan forests 2) to explore the potential of deriving post-medieval ecological and societal changes from archaeological and historical timber 3) to apply emerging proxies (wood traits, DNA, chemical composition) to develop novel tools for identification of timber origin that may explain past human-environment interactions. To achieve these objectives, the project will be implemented in three stages: 1) Collection of ancient trees samples in Baetic mountains and Moroccan Rif and Atlas to analyse the forest history and unlock the wooden archive containing the key for understanding the historical exploitation of resources. Tree-growth chronologies and wood traits will be estimated by wood scanning and measurement of tree-ring widths. 2) The legacy of forest history and wood trade between trans-Mediterranean continents will be analysed through multi-century ring series preserved in archaeological and post-medieval historical wood material. Old buildings will be explored to analyse wood origin in relation to the magnitude of historical use of forests. 3) Application of a battery of novel techniques (blue intensity, wood anatomy, elemental composition and stable isotopes) for developing a new timber provenancing tool – dendroscapes.

This project studies the historical relationship between military technology, globalization and the rise of European overseas empires by focusing on the provisioning system of cannons in the first political entity which ever connected the four parts of the world: the Iberian Union (1580-1640). If cannons have become a symbol of early modern European expansion, no study has tackled their contribution in sustaining overseas conquests. In defence of dozens of sea-fortresses and on board of hundreds of ships spread around the globe, cannons played a crucial role in the first globalization as key infrastructures of the Iberian empires. The project aims to shed light on this world-wide deployment of artillery technology by revealing the emergence of a system combining gun-manufactures in Europe, America and Asia, all connected through circulations of weapons, raw material and technical experts. The special attention granted to the actors of the system intends to highlight the importance of human capital in the imperial state-building and globalizing processes. The project implements a twofold interdisciplinary methodology: while computer software is used in order to quantify and map the system, archival sources are crossed with material evidence coming from the wide collections of cannons hold in museums so as to reveal circulations and hybridizations of knowledge. Complemented by thorough archival work on case studies about the gun-foundries in Mexico, Cuba, Manila and Macau, this research addresses the issue of technological asymmetries between centres and peripheries inside the Iberian empires and questions the role of European colonial spaces in the globalization of the military revolution. By doing so, this project contributes to two EU priorities as it provides a reflection, from a historical perspective, on Europe’s place in a global context and generates knowledge on the cultural heritage of European coastal areas regarding their proto-industrial developments.

In the last decade the approaches of the global history have been emphasized in order to visualize the progress, form and method which historians have undertaken when carrying out ambitious research projects to analyse and compare diverse geographical and cultural areas of Asia and Europe. But when dealing with comparisons and cross-cultural studies in Europe and Asia, some scholarly works have exceeded of ambiguities when defining geographical units as well as chronology. In this project I examine perceptions and dialogues between China and Europe by analysing strategic geopolitical sites which fostered commerce, consumption and socioeconomic networks between China and Europe through a particular case study: Macau, connecting with South China, and Marseille in Mediterranean Europe. How did foreign merchant networks and trans-national communities of Macau and Marseille operate during the eighteenth century and contribute to somehow transfer respectively European and Chinese socio-cultural habits and forms in local population? What was the degree and channels of consumption of European goods in China and Chinese goods in Europe? These are the main questions to answer during my research to explore the bilateral Sino-European trade relations and how the trans-national dimension of exotic commodities changed tastes by creating a new type of global consumerism. Such concrete comparison can help to narrow the gap that some researchers have created when widely analysing differences between Asia and Europe without a specific geographical and chronological delineation. The major novelty of this project is based on the use of Chinese and European sources to study changes in consumer behaviour. The principal investigator of the project works in China which is and added value for the achievement of outstanding results. So the expected results will bring an obvious breakthrough by adding the specific part of the project in which each team member will work.

Visual neuroprostheses or the bionic eyes, aim to restore patterned vision to the blind by electrically stimulating the remaining neurons in the visual system. The ultimate goal of bionic eye research as a means of treating vision loss is the capacity to reproduce the same neural messages that travel between the eye and the brain of normal vision. The visual system 'sees' the world by way of sending signals to the brain that indicate transitions from 'light ON to light OFF' and from 'light OFF to light ON' wherever a transition exists. Despite the remarkable progress over the last decade, until recently, visual neuroprostheses could only stimulate both the ‘ON-to-OFF’ and the ‘OFF-to-ON’ pathways simultaneously, sending confusing neural messages to the brain. Selective activation has been demonstrated in vitro while validated computational models predict that neural signals can be modulated by affecting these waveforms. This proposal aims to investigate, in a functional model of the disease (Royal College of Surgeons rats), new ways to preferentially activate the aforementioned visual pathways using amplitude- and frequency- modulated signals combined with low-power noise. It is expected that the resulting neural encoding to be more natural and to therefore improve the perception of the bionic eye recipients. Two strategies will be adopted: (1) acute electrophysiology experiments to obtain optimal stimulation parameters, and (2) chronic studies in behaving animals with retinal degeneration subjected to classical conditioning. This is a highly multidisciplinary proposal that includes a comprehensive plan for the dissemination of the results among the scientific community and the general public, while providing opportunities for industrial engagement. The fellow will be immersed in a motivating research environment and will be exposed to a series of training and networking activities which provide an excellent ground for future career perspectives.