ECHOES

In October 2018, I flew from the Netherlands to Canada, thinking of the Viking longships that once defied the ocean waves below me. These vessels carried bands of Vikings (or Norse) most likely from western Greenland. When they rowed their boats ashore,...

Ancient Egypt is one of the first civilisations that pops to mind when one talks about antiquity, since the modern world has always had a fascination with the remnants of its culture. The ECHOES team recently had an incredible opportunity to work on some...

Amid the ongoing pandemic, the ECHOES team has undergone a degree of change, and yet remained surprisingly productive. Our physicist, Andrea Scifo, has taken on the full-time role of operating the Micadas accelerator mass spectrometer in the Centre for...

The ECHOES group is doing its best to continue the research programme whilst not violating any national restrictions, as the Netherlands' oscillates between gedeeltelijke and volledige lockdowns. We had a productive summer and have squirrelled away enough...

Imagine if we were only able to place events from the 20th century in time to within a few decades. We would not be able to tell, for instance, whether rock and roll originated before or after Elvis Presley was born, or how the fall of the Berlin Wall...

As with much of the Western World, the ECHOES team have recently had to abandon their posts and 'shelter in place'. Our host institution, the University of Groningen, effectively went into lockdown in mid-March and all practical work ceased at that time....

Radiocarbon analysis of single tree-rings is booming. Occasionally, such analysis allows objects to be dated as precise as at the exact calendar year! But sampling single tree-rings is not easy. One needs knowledge of the growth of the wood species and to...