Periodic Reporting for period 1 - BEFOREtheFLOOD (Neolithic coastal settlements and responses to environmental dynamics: A pioneering world lost beneath the Mediterranean Sea)
Période du rapport: 2022-10-01 au 2025-03-31
Coastal societies hold a vital place in Mediterranean history; many of their earliest trajectories, however, are archaeologically obscure due to a rise in sea levels since the last Ice Age. BEFOREtheFLOOD is based on an observation that before it was inundated, the Mediterranean littoral was extremely dynamic (e.g. formation/retreat of marshes, increased soil salinity, rapidly rising sea levels), necessitating constant reactions by its inhabitants. This project study how Neolithic coastal societies in the Eastern Mediterranean pioneered cultural responses to environmental changes, and how these enabled the development of Mediterranean complex societies. The earliest known Mediterranean coastal settlements and their paleo-landscapes, now situated offshore along the Carmel Coast, Israel, are studied by drilling sediment cores and through underwater excavations, followed by microscopic and chemical analysis in the laboratory that integrate geoarchaeology, bioarchaeology and paleoenvironmental reconstructions. The project's novelty lies in its approach to generate a high-resolution diachronic model of how hyper-localized environmental dynamics are directly related to archaeological evidence of adaptive solutions. The project tests how Neolithic coastal communities constantly re-adapted to dynamic environmental processes over time by modifying their environment, and developing new technologies and social interactions that fostered the establishment of a unique Mediterranean coastal society. BEFOREtheFLOOD elucidates an important and as-yet unread chapter of a world now lost beneath the sea; one that will help to rewrite the early story of the Eastern Mediterranean coast as the springboard for innovation, adaptation, and connectivity that set the scene for the development of later Mediterranean complex societies.
Under this project a new integrated field and microanalytical methodological protocol was developed to investigate deep stratigraphic sequences (up to 2 m) within the submerged Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPN) site of Atlit-Yam (9267–7970 cal. B.P. [calibrated years before the present]). A new coring method for the extraction of deep underwater stratigraphy was developed to extract cores between architectural remains within the site and outside the site. The cores are analysed using Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy, phytolith and pollen analysis, geo-chemical characterisation, sediment micromorphology and radiometric dating coupled with geo-physical survey of the ancient coastal area. This suit of analyses allows to detect buried anthropogenic signals and perform paleoenvironmental reconstruction of a micro-region at a high resolution.
Our results help to better date the early presence of people on the coast of the Eastern Mediterranean and to reconstruct at high resolution not only the coastal settlements and human activity at the coast, but also to reconstruct in unprecedented details their immediate environment and how they relate to one another and change through time. Thus, this project bears implications for reassessing the emergence of the first coastal Neolithic villages in the Mediterranean. The new integrated field and multiproxy micro-geoarchaeological protocol developed under this project offers a new approach to detecting and studying submerged archaeological sites worldwide.