ROOTS Excellence Cluster receives funding for second stage of research

Excellence Commission approves up to 60 million Euro in funding for Kiel-based research into histories of people and the environment.

The ROOTS Cluster of Excellence is celebrating the announcement of its success in its application for a second period of funding, to run from 2026 to 2032, from the Excellence Strategy of the German federal and state governments. The renewed funding, amounting to approximately 60 million Euro and announced in Bonn on May 22, 2025, by the Joint Science Conference of the German federal and state governments, the German Research Foundation (DFG), and the German Science and Humanities Council (Wissenschaftsrat), will enable the Cluster to continue its research into the complex intertwinements linking people, cultures, and the environment in the past and their effects on our present day.

ROOTS – Social, Environmental, and Cultural Connectivity in Past Societies is a Cluster of Excellence based at Kiel University (CAU), initiated in 2019. Its aim is to retrace the roots of social, environmental, and cultural phenomena and processes which have unfolded a long-term effect on human development. The Cluster’s interdisciplinary approach brings together researchers from eighteen departments at CAU, across the humanities, sciences, social sciences, and life sciences, and from four further research institutions including the IPN, to work in archaeological and historical “laboratories,” driven by the assumption that people and their environment reciprocally influence one another, generating social and environmental connectivities that endure into the present.

Thanks to all involved in the successful application

“We’re delighted at today’s decision, and see it as a fantastic vote of confidence in our integrative approach to research, which we have been busy realizing in our work to date. During ROOTS’ initial phase, we’ve been linking archaeological academic disciplines with other humanities, the sciences, and life sciences, opening up fascinating new insights into fundamental processes characterizing human societies of the past,” said Prof. Dr. Martin Furholt, an archaeologist and spokesperson of the Cluster’s second phase, responding to the announcement. “But many questions still remain, given the diversity of the human societies that have existed over the last 15,000 years. Having won renewed funding will help enable us to pursue these questions and find answers.”

Martin Furholt and Prof. Johannes Müller, ROOTS’ current spokespeople, expressed their thanks to all their colleagues who had helped prepare the funding application for ROOTS 2. “It was an amazing achievement, that we produced as a team. The energy and commitment, the knowledge and enthusiasm that all those involved dedicated to the application, from the academic and the administrative sides alike, were all crucial in bringing about this success. Working in a team like this is a fantastic experience,” said Johannes Müller. “We’d also like to thank the state government of Schleswig-Holstein und Kiel University for their committed support for the application,” added Martin Furholt.

Among ROOTS’ research attainments over the past seven years have been significant new discoveries around how early societies passed knowledge down the generations, how social inequalities came into being and what impacts they had, and how societies resolved conflict, alongside work pinpointing the origins of urban dynamics. “As well as all this, we’ve made quite a few surprising findings; examples of these might be the highly non-linear character of human societies’ development and the multi-layered composition of processes that have taken place in the last 15,000 years of history. These findings have called numerous current assumptions around the drivers of socio-ecological change and the motivations behind human actions into question,” Johannes Müller notes.

ROOTS 2 to expand its approach

The second phase of ROOTS, building on these findings, will expand its approach, centering on the diversity of societal and ecological interconnections: “We’ll be placing greater emphasis, for instance, on identifying patterns and regularities in prehistory and history, with an increased focus on non-European examples and points of view. We believe this will help us to better contextualize the great diversity of people and their lives in the past,” Martin Furholt explains.

Additional professorships and postdoc positions will help ROOTS extend its foci in its second phase, as will changes to the group’s structures. A new research unit, titled “Core of Synthesis,” will engage in systematic work on the reciprocities and interdependencies among key factors such as how people earned their living, biodiversity, inequality and conflict, technology and its environmental footprint, and boundaries and wellbeing. The group expects these studies to feed into a greater understanding around the origins of current global challenges such as climate change, polarization in societies, exploitation, and separation.

The Cluster will continue structural processes commenced in the first phase of ROOTS’ research, principally including the planning and construction of the ARCWorlds research center at Kiel University, approved by the German Science and Humanities Counsil in 2023. The establishment of a Center for Collaborative Synthesis in Archaeology (CCSA) in Kiel, in cooperation with the international Coalition for Archaeological Synthesis (CfAS), is currently in progress. The CCSA will serve as a hub for coordinating projects that bring together archaeological data, theories, and methodologies to form an overall picture of humanity’s past.

“The funding from the Excellence Strategy has significantly raised the international profile of archaeology, and other disciplines studying the past in human society, here in Kiel. We have advanced to take a consistent place in the global top 20 of international league tables such as the QS University Ranking; we are convinced that ROOTS 2, ARCWorlds, the CCSA, and our integrated, multi-disciplinary approach to our research will help us to further consolidate this position,” says Johannes Müller.

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