Bram Smith is a UKRI NERC funded PhD student at BioArCh (Department of Archaeology, University of York). They are researching medieval crop management through the stable isotope analysis of charred plant remains, focusing on France and Spain.
By exploring a wide variety of sites from different socio-economic contexts, religious backgrounds and settlement types, the crops grown and the farming techniques present can be compared, and the impact of social and cultural factors can be examined, as well as the development of farming over time.
Their previous research focused on identifying water availability in wheat, barley and sorghum within medieval France and Spain, using techniques which they are applying to a wider range of crops as a part of MEDGREENREV.