Project description
Whales’ role in the development of coastal economies Ice Age Europe
There is growing evidence that early coastal economies during the Magdalenian culture in Europe, between 18 000 and 15 000 years ago, grew by exploiting whales. Whale bone artefacts in northern Spain’s Cantabria region revealed the presence of routine and organised communication networks. It is not known if this was only at local level or Europe-wide. With a focus on Spanish coasts, the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions WHALEBONE project aims to address this question by identifying cetacean bone objects beyond the Pyreneo-Cantabrian region. To do so, it will implement a technique to analyse proteins and a minimally invasive programme for dating cetacean bone objects.
Objective
The Whalebone project builds upon new advances in the study of past human adaptations to coastal environments, focusing on a key case study: early interactions between Late Upper Palaeolithic foragers and cetaceans at the end of the Last Glaciation in Western Europe. Over the last decade, a growing body of evidence suggests that the exploitation of whales could have been one of the significant factors underlying the development of early coastal economies during the Magdalenian culture, between 18,000 to 15,000 years ago. The recent identification of 54 whale bone artefacts in the Cantabrian region (northern Spain) during the previous postdoctoral research of the PR, to which can be added the 109 previously known Pyrenean examples, revealed the existence of regular and structured communication networks for the long-distance circulation of these marine resources. However, these studies focused only on the Bay of Biscay and it is still unclear whether this phenomenon was a strictly local adaptation or was part of a wider, shared coastal economy connecting different parts of Europe. To test this hypothesis, Whalebone proposes to identify cetacean bone objects outside the Pyreneo-Cantabrian region, focusing on the Spanish coasts. As many Magdalenian sites are close to the paleo-shorelines that yielded rich osseous industries, the Mediterranean coast is a particularly crucial area of investigation. Direct (dolphin bones) and indirect (whale barnacles) evidence for the exploitation of cetaceans in its southern part confirms the early interest and management of marine mammals. A multi-proxy approach beyond traditional zooarchaeology, including the first use of an innovative ancient proteomic technology (ZooMS), together with a minimally invasive dating program of cetacean bone objects, will be undertaken by Whalebone in order to address long-standing questions about long-term forager mobility patterns, regional interactions and coastal adaptations on a European scale.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- natural sciences earth and related environmental sciences physical geography glaciology
- humanities history and archaeology archaeology bioarchaeology
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2021-PF-01
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39005 Santander
Spain
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