Description du projet
Découvrir les facteurs à l’origine d’une croissance démographique au plus profond de l’Amazonie au cours des 10 000 dernières années
La découverte des facteurs à l’origine de croissance démographique à l’époque préhistorique est un véritable défi, car les relevés archéologiques sont fragmentés et détériorés. Pour résoudre ce problème, le projet DEMODRIVERS, financé par l’UE, recréera la dynamique de la population dans le sud-ouest de l’Amazonie au cours de l’Holocène et découvrira les changements environnementaux et culturels qui l’ont influencée. Il mettra l’accent sur la région de Llanos de Moxos, en Amazonie bolivienne, où l’on a récemment découvert des relevés archéologiques quasi complets. Cette région abrite 4 700 sites répartis sur 100 000 km2 couvrant 10 600 ans. Le projet déterminera la mesure dans laquelle les tendances démographiques ont été le fruit d’une réaction à des facteurs tels que le climat et la culture.
Objectif
This project aims to reconstruct the human demography of SW Amazonia during the Holocene and to reveal the role of environmental and cultural changes in shaping it. Despite decades of research, the relative importance of environmental vs cultural factors in determining prehistoric population growth is still one of archaeology’s greatest scientific challenges. Reaching an agreement about the drivers of demographic dynamics is very difficult because of the fragmentary, incomplete and biased nature of archaeological records. DEMODRIVERS is designed to overcome this problem. This five-year interdisciplinary project will investigate the patterns and drivers of human demographic dynamics by focusing on a regional case study, the Llanos de Moxos (LM) in the Bolivian Amazon, that has a potentially unparalleled explanatory power. This region at the southwestern end of the Amazon hosts a recently discovered, almost complete archaeological record, made up of 4700 sites spanning 8300 years and distributed over 100,000 km2. This area is unique in the world, offering us the first opportunity to quantify how far demographic trends and patterns responded to exogenous (climate, landscape) and endogenous (culture, technology) variables. This project will exploit the full potential of the LM archaeological record by taking an unconventional approach: the density of the occupation and its spatial and temporal boundaries will be measured by studying 150 stratigraphic cores extracted from 100 evenly distributed archaeological sites. The approach is interdisciplinary, integrating conventional archaeology with state-of-art geoarchaeology, biomarkers, paleoclimatology, palaeoecology and artificial intelligence. The results of the project will provide a very thoroughly documented case study against which other models and reconstructions based on incomplete, fragmented and often biased datasets can be compared. The results of the project have broad implications across several disciplines.
Champ scientifique
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesartificial intelligence
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencespalaeontologypaleoclimatology
- social sciencessociologydemography
- humanitieshistory and archaeologyarchaeologyethnoarchaeology
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencespalaeontologypaleoecology
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Régime de financement
ERC - Support for frontier research (ERC)Institution d’accueil
08193 Cerdanyola Del Valles
Espagne