Mediterranean Coastal Resources: benefits and constraints for Prehistoric hunters-gatherers

Project Information

MedCoRes

Grant agreement ID: 704822

DOI

10.3030/704822

Project closed

EC signature date 20 April 2016

Start date 1 January 2017

End date 31 December 2018

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 158 121,60

EU contribution

€ 158 121,60

Coordinated by

FUNDACIO PRIVADA INSTITUT CATALA DE PALEOECOLOGIA HUMANA I EVOLUCIO SOCIAL
Spain

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - MedCoRes (Mediterranean Coastal Resources: benefits and constraints for Prehistoric hunters-gatherers)

Reporting period: 2017-01-01 to 2018-12-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Coastal environments have long been attractive for societies but in the context of increasing risks associated with current global changes, populations living along the coasts are exposed to the consequence of rapid sea-level rise. What exactly will be the consequences of the sea-level on the environments? How people can accommodate with?

Nine to eight thousand years ago, after the massive melting of ice sheet following the last glaciation, the global sea-level rose of almost 100 meters’ height, flooding the ancient coastal plains. People living at that time, the last hunter-gatherers, experienced rates of sea level rise and has to adapt to dramatic transformations of their environments, of similar or higher amplitude than the ones modelled for future. Studying past coastal adaptations can provide clues to understand human resilience to climate and environmental changes.

The Project MedCoRes “Mediterranean Coastal Resources: benefits and constraints for Prehistoric hunters-gatherers” proposed to investigate how Mediterranean coastal ecosystems and climatic changes have affected settlement and subsistence patterns during the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition. Specifically, MedCoRes aimed to reconstruct the evolution of coastal landscapes in the close vicinity of well-known Mesolithic-Neolithic settlement area through the multi-proxy analysis of sediment cores of Pego-Oliva lagoon (Western Mediterranean). The objectives were the reconstruction of the past environmental changes in a well-constrain chronology and the comparison of the inferred environmental dynamics with archaeological datasets from the study area.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The new and extensive fieldwork program developed for the MedCoRes project has permitted to extract a series of 16 geological boreholes of about 15 meters deep in the wetland of Pego-Oliva allowing investigating the evolution in three-dimensions of the basin sedimentary infilling over time. Back to the laboratory, the composition of the sediments has been characterized, both looking for the mineral and biological contents in order to give precise information on the past ecosystems. Second, thanks to the fined-tuned radiocarbon chronology that we built, the environmental evolution have been precisely compared with the archaeological sites located in the close vicinity, especially with the long-lasting Mesolithic site of El Collado (Oliva), exceptional for the rich material that have been recovered, including human burial and exploited shellfish. The temporal concomitances of the coastal environmental changes with past human record have permitted to decipher processes at the origin of the human evolution in this region. The results, of high-interest, have been published in an outstanding journal of the field (Brisset et al., 2018a – Global and Planetary Changes), and disseminated in one workshop (Brisset et al., 2017), two conferences (Brisset et al., 2018b, 2018c; Fernández-López de Pablo et al., 2018) and one poster exhibition (Brisset, 2018). Based on these new results, a series of outreach activities (i.e. regional radio, online press, poster exhibition, and activity on social media) have been done in order to raise public awareness on the impacts of sea-level rise on coastal areas using the broader perspective given by the history.

References:
-BRISSET E., BURJACHS F., BALLESTEROS NAVARRO B. J., FERNÁNDEZ-LÓPEZ de PABLO J., 2018a. Socio-ecological adaptation to Early-Holocene sea-level rise in the western Mediterranean. Global and Planetary Changes, 169, 156-167.
-BRISSET E., FERNÁNDEZ-LÓPEZ de PABLO J., BURJACHS F., 2018b. Reconstruction and impact of seascape evolution on human communities during the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition in the Mediterranean Iberia. 24th meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists, Barcelona, Spain.
-BRISSET E., FERNÁNDEZ-LÓPEZ de PABLO J., BURJACHS F., 2018c. The coastal palaeoenvironmental evolution of Pego-Oliva during the Mesolithic-Neolithic Transition (Western Mediterranean): A contribution to the “Maritime Pioneer Colonization Model”. 24th meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists. Barcelona, Spain.
-BRISSET E., 2018. Mediterranean Coastal Resources: benefits and constraints for Prehistoric hunters-gatherers”, final results of the MedCoRes project (MSCA-IF-2015, Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships no. 704822). IPHES’s poster exhibition (12/2018-01/2019). Tarragona, Spain.
-FERNÁNDEZ-LÓPEZ de PABLO J., BRISSET E., POLO A., RABUÑAL J.R. GÓMEZ-PUCHE M., BURJACHS F., 2018. Early Holocene socio-ecological dynamics in the central Mediterranean region of Iberia. XVIIIe world UISPP Congress. Paris, France.
-BRISSET E., BURJACHS F., FERNÁNDEZ-LÓPEZ de PABLO J., 2017. First results of the MedCoRes project and research perspectives (Mediterranean Coastal Resources: benefit and constraint for Prehistoric hunter-gatherer). Workshop “Between sea and ocean: archaeology and coastal landscapes”. Empúries, Spain.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Thanks to the project MedCoRes, we demonstrated how Mesolithic hunter-gatherers have long benefited of the resource offered by coastal lagoon biotopes. This long-lasting equilibrium between ecosystem resources and human subsistence practices ended 8200 years ago, the moment when ongoing sea-level rise caused the disappearance of coastal lagoons and the dramatic contraction of coastal plains, seriously affecting the subsistence and settlement patterns of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers. In contrast, this situation has been different for the first farmer’s populations that implanted here 700 years later. Showing that population with different cultural baggage - the Mesolithic’s last hunter-gatherers and the Neolithic’s farmers - have had different perceptions of their local environment, once as constraint, once as benefit for their own exploitation, this study echoes ongoing concerns about accelerated ecosystem changes, that is the most perceptible effect of global changes at the scale of individuals. This study is not only relevant to enhance our understanding of the human resilience to environmental and climate changes, it is also an excellent example of how bringing environmental and archaeological sciences allow going further in the interpretations that one discipline alone cannot.

Graphical abstract of the article of Brisset et al 2018, in the journal Global and Planetary Changes

Geological coring of a littoral plain to recover old sediments deposited during the sea-level rise