Project description
Ancient humans’ perceptions of climate change
The Holocene represents a key period for the Upper Jordan Valley since major transformations occurred in ecosystems there provoked by environmental changes and humans. The region, and in particular the Hula lake, is rich in palaeoecological and geochemical materials and provides unique information about the effects of climate change and human activity on the environment. The EU-funded GEOLAKE project aims at an understanding of the role of climate change and anthropogenic activity in local ecosystems and will study the long-term human adaptation process in the region. It will compare palaeoenvironmental data generated in the context of the project with archaeological and historical evidence to understand how ancient societies perceived climate changes, permanently modified their environment and used methods of environmental management.
Objective
The overriding aim of GEOLAKE is to disentangle the effects of climate change and anthropogenic activities on the environment and to highlight the long-term adaptation of populations in the Upper Jordan Valley (Israel) using sedimentary, palaeoecological and geochemical proxies from the lake Hula as unique case-study example. The lacustrine archives of the Hula will facilitate a high-resolution reconstruction of human-environment dynamics since the emergence of the region’s first complex societies in the Early Neolithic. In this part of the Levant, the Holocene is a key period during which environmental changes and human pressures profoundly transformed local ecosystems providing new key knowledge to constrain the concept of the Anthropocene in the region. The comparison of palaeoenvironmental data generated within the framework of our project with archaeological and historical evidence will allow us to develop an innovative “local human occupation index” to understand the evolution of the human pressures in the Hula catchment and to propose models looking to: (1) understand how ancient societies perceived and reacted in the face of environmental and climatic changes; (2) understand how they lastingly modified their environment; (3) estimate how their methods of environmental management were influenced by external variations. The Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) is the ideal institutional environment to develop the proposed research during the course of the fellowship and beyond. The researcher will be trained and integrated into in a strong collaborative and multidisciplinary network. This fellowship will reinforce the research experience, transferrable skills, audience and outreach, and will thus be crucial for his future career. Furthermore, the project will rest upon strong collaborations with Israeli scientists who are excavating in the region since several decades.
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Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinator
08193 Cerdanyola Del Valles
Spain