ICUB invites you to the lecture “Off the beaten track: The Significance of the Black Sea Regions for European Neolithization”, delivered by Dr. Marta Andriiovych from the University of Oxford and the University of Bern

On Friday, 5 December 2025, the Research Institute of the University of Bucharest (ICUB) invites you to the 48th ArchaeoSciences seminar. This edition’s guest speaker is Dr. Marta Andriiovych, from the School of Archaeology of the University of Oxford and the Institute of Archaeological Sciences of the University of Bern, who will present a lecture titled “Off the beaten track: The Significance of the Black Sea Regions for European Neolithization”.

The seminar will take place starting with 11:00 (EET) at the Administrative Building within the “Dimitrie Brândză” Botanical Garden (Șoseaua Cotroceni 32, Bucharest), room E104, 1^st floor.

About the presentation

Due to historical and geographical circumstances, the Black Sea Regions form a unique research area between Europe and Asia. Today, the coasts of the Black Sea belong to the modern states of Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Georgia, and Russia. The different political pathways of Western Europe and the former Soviet Union during the 20th century did not allow for holistic investigations nor a comprehensive exchange of archaeological investigations across the area. This disjointed situation occurred because of the different political regimes of the relevant countries, different languages and even religions, and the lack of international researchers feeling at home in both worlds (Ivanova, 2013, pp. 3-6). Nowadays, the globalisation streams in humanitarian and sociological research tend to close the existing gaps.

The mainstream theory assumes that the Neolithisation process of Europe started from the core area in the Levant, Upper Mesopotamia, and Anatolia, then spread to the Aegean, and from there entered Europe via south-eastern Europe (Danube axis) and south-western Europe (Mediterranean axis). The question of the Neolithisation of Eastern Europe and the Caucasian regions have remained largely unaddressed in the (Western) European consideration of the spread of the Neolithisation. As a result, most maps visualising the Neolithisation of Europe only indicate one direction from Anatolia to Europe. Do they make a mistake, or is there a plausible explanation?

This talk will examine the specific features and challenges of the Black Sea region and why it holds a different position in prehistory compared to later archaeological and historical periods. It will discuss the distribution of prehistoric sites from the late Mesolithic to the Eneolithic/Chalcolithic periods around the sea, based on available C14 data. Another major topic is the transition from Mesolithic to Neolithic and from Neolithic to Eneolithic, due to differences in the meanings of the basic terms around the Black Sea. This leads to the main question of the present research: possible migration routes around the Black Sea from the perspective of the Ukrainian territory.

Dr. Marta Andriiovych started her archaeology path in high school, at the age of 14, when she went archaeological excavations for three weeks with a summer school. Those three weeks helped her decide to be an archaeologist. She got her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the Taras Shevchenko University of Kyiv with proper education in Archaeology, Museology and World History. Shortly after that, she won the Swiss Excellence Government scholarship for her PhD studies at the Institute for Archaeological Sciences at the University of Bern, Switzerland. She defended her PhD on the 24^th of February 2022, despite the start of war in Ukraine. Since then, she won a Seed Grant at the University of Bern and had a year-long postdoc position in Switzerland. During that time, she was awarded with SNF Post Doc Mobility and, in 2023, moved to continue her research at the School of Archaeology, at the University of Oxford. For the last two years, she has been working on the topic of the migrations around the Black Sea and on the investigation of a specific theoretical archaeological question which are connected to the research. In this project, she is also focusing on the GIS and Archaeobotanical methods.

These seminars are an original initiative of the ArchaeoSciences Platform (ASp) at ICUB, which aims to provide an open space for professionals in archaeological sciences worldwide to share knowledge and engage with the latest methodological and theoretical advances in the study of the past. They also offer Romanian students a valuable opportunity to discover the interdisciplinary dimensions of archaeology and archaeosciences.