Oxford's Amy Styring talks on crop isotopes and past farming at the Cyprus Institute on 30 October

Amy Styring, Associate Professor of Archaeological Science at the University of Oxford, gives a seminar at The Cyprus Institute in Nicosia on Friday 30 October 2026. Her title is Isotopic Insights Into Past Cultivation and Dietary Practices, and the talk starts at 15:00. It is in English and open to the public.

The seminar is hybrid: people can come to the Andreas Mouskos Auditorium or follow on Zoom. Entry is free, and the Institute asks those attending to register with Andri Kyriacou by Monday 26 October. The event is listed with OneArchSci, funded by the European Union under Horizon Europe (Grant Agreement No 101186503).

Styring's subject is the carbon and nitrogen isotopes in burnt seeds and grain from excavations. She argues that these values can show how heavily farmers manured their fields and how they watered them. Measured crops also give a baseline for reading human and animal bones, so that the share of plant and animal protein in a diet can be estimated more closely. She has also used strontium in plant remains to follow crops that moved, and strontium and oxygen in animal teeth to follow livestock.

Charred plant remains lie behind recent work on Cypriot farming: wheat and figs at Chalcolithic Chlorakas-Palloures, and charred barley at Pyla-Kokkinokremos that its authors read as a store of animal fodder from around 1200 BCE.