Matthew Collins is an Archaeologist working in Cambridge and Copenhagen who is interested in the use of material culture, specifically parchment (skins) and (beeswax) seals as tools to explore the environmental history and management of fauna in the past.

In January Alex Sapoznik of King's College London, explored the economic history of medieval beeswax in 'Bees and Beeswax - the gold of the medieval world?' . In a follow up lecture Matthew Collins will describe the ArcHives project, a team of researchers funded by the Carlsberg foundation, attempting to expand the range of records recovered from well dated historical beeswax. The ArcHives project is trying to establish how we might recover this information, and what questions we can ask about ecology, economy and conservation from this unexpected, but abundant record.

Beeswax may prove to be one of the most remarkable and yet overlooked biomolecular archives. The chosen source of illumination of the medieval church, beeswax can now shed new light on a domesticated insect, the management of forests, crops and weeds, medieval trade in wax, social networks of people, of rituals associated with exchange, and the bureaucracies and protocols of authentication and security in the medieval world.

The aim of ArcHives is to use wax as a biomolecular archive to inform upon:

the geographic origin of beeswax (and bees)

the changing diversity of the hive microbiome in modern and historical beeswax

the DNA of individuals associated with the production of the legal documents trapped in kneaded wax

Another avenue, to be pursued are the threats, bees are succumbing to. ArcHives will provide information on historical bee populations, their genetic makeup, the micro-biomes and parasites they hosted as well as the flowering plants they exploited for pollen and nectar. It will provide baseline data from which to help understand the modern collapse. It is currently immensely fashionable to host bee-hives in parks and gardens in the large cities. Perhaps, the project will yield information about which flowers, would be most profitable to grow in these gardens?

In addition, there is a curious obsession with the idea that we should recover the genomes of famous people. Many sculptors worked in beeswax and it has previously been demonstrated that it is possible to source the beeswax and therefore provide some degree of authentication by examining the distribution of pollen as it relates to time and place.

https://www.palaeome.org/collins-group/people/matthew-collins

https://sites.google.com/palaeome.org/archives/home

You can also read a very interesting article from one of Matthew's colleagues Dr Alister Sutherland about beeswax seals in the Middle Ages in the September magazine of Beecraft magazine here.

Main photograph:

A CT images of a bee pupa in a historical honeycomb held in the Danish Natural History Museum made for Mathew by the Danfix platform.

About the speaker

Matthew Collins, is a Niels Bohr Professor at the University of Copenhagen and McDonald Professor of Palaeoproteomics at the University of Cambridge, in the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. Prior to joining Cambridge he was professor of biomolecular archaeology at the University of York where he founded BioArCh, a collaboration between the departments of biology, chemistry and archaeology (BioArCh: Biology Archaeology, Chemistry). In 2014 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy, the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences.

Matthew is interested in the use of material culture, specifically parchment (skins) and (beeswax) seals as tools to explore the environmental history and management of fauna in the past. His research explores the processes by which proteins undergo decay and how we can exploit new palaeoproteomics methods in the service of palaeontology, archaeology and cultural heritage. These methods enable him to extract rich data from ancient beeswax seals, including information on the flowers that grew in each region from year to year.

Mathew Collins with two colleagues in the conservation studio of the Arnamagnæan Institute, University of Copenhagen