EXPANDING CONCEPT AND METHODOLOGY FOR HUMAN PAST STUDIES IN THE EASTERN BALTICS COUNTRIES

ECHO consolidates the existing academic excellence and creates new synergies in the Eastern Baltics by bringing together humanitarian scholars (archaeologists, historians), natural scientists (geneticists, bioinformaticians) and experts from the intersection of those disciplines (anthropologists) from the region to enhance and promote research in the human past within the interdisciplinary framework. The motivation of the ECHO is to understand the processes behind the current diversity of peoples and cultures, the role and mutual interaction of demographic developments and environmental changes in those processes, and to share this knowledge with society. The ECHO's pan-Eastern Baltic network of archaeogenomic research will link the resources of the three Baltic countries – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – to conduct internationally competitive research on the human past. Within ECHO, the knowledge ofstate-of-the-art analytical tools and interdisciplinary project and data management skills, transferred from advanced EU partners, will be tested for addressing timely questions about the human past, with the focus on currently understudied local evolutionary developments during the post-Bronze Age period in the Eastern Baltic region. The synergistic science conducted within ECHO will help to increase the visibility of the research done in the Eastern Baltic region on the human past at both European and global scales and to contribute to the common knowledge about the processes that have shaped the present diversity of human populations in the Eastern Baltic region, in the spatiotemporal context of Europe. ECHO will contribute to sustainable interdisciplinary research on archaeogenomics in the Eastern Baltics, supported by the consolidated network of regional research centres, enhanced concepts and enriched methodology