Jiří Macháček, head of the Department of Archaeology and Museology, is the first scholar at Masaryk University to receive the prestigious ERC Synergy Grant. It is also the 17th ERC grant awarded to MU. Thanks to the grant, Macháček’s team will focus on researching the development of Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. They aim to examine the important but largely unexplored impact of ordinary people on post-Roman Europe. The project will be conducted in cooperation with Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Italy, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium and Leiden University in the Netherlands, which is coordinating the research.
What happened to Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire? Researchers have been trying to answer this question for a long time. Until now, studies of the period between 450 and 900 AD have mostly focused on political history and the acts and decisions of kings, bishops and aristocrats, and their dominance over various peoples, as recorded in written sources of the time.
“Archaeologists, too, tended to focus on rich graves and other impressive finds. But there is another kind of archaeology. An archaeology that documents the lives of ordinary people, who made up 99 per cent of the population and have long remained in the shadow of the elites, even though they were just as important, if not more so, for the development of a new society after the collapse of the Roman Empire,” says Jiří Macháček from the MU Faculty of Arts.
In the project Connected Communities in early medieval Europe, the researchers will examine thousands of objects found in the graves of ordinary people, as well as the historical context of burial customs observed across Europe during that period.
“We would like to challenge the traditional idea that after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, a once unified and interconnected Europe broke apart into many isolated and mutually hostile barbarian kingdoms ruled by elite, ethnically defined groups. This image, created by historians of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, still largely shapes how people think about the Migration Period, which linked the Roman world with the medieval one. Yet these authors belonged to the political and intellectual elite and wrote their histories in the interests of that group,” says Macháček. He adds that the current research will present a different medieval Europe – the Europe of the majority population, which has long been underestimated, despite the clear archaeological evidence for this social group.
“The fact that early medieval Europe was highly interconnected even at the level of ordinary people is demonstrated by many of the objects found in their graves, as well as by the rituals they shared despite great distances. Research into ancient DNA confirms this too,” adds Macháček.
The researchers aim to go “beyond DNA” and beyond purely genetic connections, showing how these ties emerged and how they were maintained. They want to emphasise what early medieval Europe had in common rather than what divided it.
“We are convinced that the everyday habits, ideas and social ties of ordinary people were just as important for the post-Roman development of Europe as the heroic deeds of kings, aristocrats or saints described in written sources. In our research, we will focus on specific categories of artefacts made from more readily available materials, mainly iron and glass, and on their distribution across Europe. We will rely on newly developed innovative chemical and physical analyses to determine their origins and patterns of distribution. We will also look at how and why ideas, such as burial customs, became widespread across Europe, and how various places scattered across the landscape, which served as formal and informal meeting points, facilitated communication and the exchange of ideas, knowledge, manufactured goods and raw materials,” says Macháček.
He notes that the planned research is strongly interdisciplinary, drawing on knowledge and methods from different disciplines to understand the multiple pathways that led to the emergence of the foundations of the Europe we live in today, and international, bringing together specialists from across the continent.
The demanding preparation of the ERC project took place within the framework of the Jan Amos Komenský Operational Programme, under a project called RES-HUM, which investigates the resilience of human culture. Jiří Macháček and researchers from the Netherlands, including Frans Theuws, were involved in the work.
ERC Synergy Grant
ERC grants are the most prestigious research grants in Europe. They emphasise the mutual enrichment of different scientific disciplines, including unconventional approaches, and research at the interface of established fields. Collaboration between different teams of experts is expected to lead to scientific breakthroughs that would not be possible through individual work. ERC-funded research sets an example for other researchers worldwide. Grants are awarded for up to six years, with a total budget of up to 10 million euros.
Connected communities in early medieval Europe
The project Connected Communities in early medieval Europe will begin in April 2026, with a budget of 10 million euros. It is the result of collaboration between leading experts in early medieval archaeology from across Europe, ensuring comprehensive coverage of the continent. Partners include Leiden University (Netherlands: Frans Theuws), KU Leuven (Belgium: Patrick Degryse), Masaryk University (Brno, Czech Republic: Jiří Macháček), Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Milan, Italy: Caterina Giostra), Uppsala University (Sweden: Alison Klevnäs), Freiburg University (Germany: Susanne Brather-Walter), Centre national de la Recherche Scientifique (Paris, France: Alexandre Disser) and the National Museum of Antiquities (Leiden, Netherlands: Lucas Petit).