Living In a Fringe Environment

LIFE (Living in a Fringe Environment) is the name of a 5-year project funded by the ERC CoGrant 681673, directed by Corinna Rossi. Host Institution was the Politecnico di Milano, Partner Institution is the Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II. The interdisciplinary research team was based at the Department ABC (Milano) and at the MUSA – Musei delle Scienze Agrarie (Portici). The project started in September 2016 and officially ended in February 2023, after two no-cost extensions.

The general scope of LIFE was to offer a complete set of archaeological and environmental data to be used to investigate Late Roman settlements along frontier desert areas and to reconstruct the underlying strategy to control the empire’s desert edges. The specific case study is the Late Roman archaeological site of Umm al-Dabadib, located at the outskirts of the the Kharga Oasis (Egypt’s Western Desert), that in the Fourth Century AD represented a portion of the southern boundary of the empire.

The EU-financed phase of the project ended, but the research and the investigation continue.

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizion 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement n°  681673).