A major collaborative project between the YEAR Centre and the BioArCh laboratories is on the preservation, degradation and extraction of biomolecules. In recent years it has become possible to identify preserved lipids that have become embedded within the pottery matrix, allowing researchers to assess what food types were being cooked or stored and to track changes in diet over time.

​BioArCh is involved in a number of ceramic based projects ranging from the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition, Medieval and Classical trade and the use of pottery by hunter-gatherers across the world, in places such as Alaska and Japan. While much of this research is laboratory based, a strength of the department is that we can use the YEAR Centre to experiment with cooking, burying and isolating ceramics in order to test hypotheses.