Description du projet
Les stratégies d’adaptation préhistoriques face aux changements environnementaux
Les sédiments lacustres naturels et les villages préhistoriques immergés dans les lacs des actuelles Albanie, Grèce et Macédoine du Nord offrent la possibilité d’étudier les changements environnementaux et sociétaux à l’aube de l’agriculture européenne, il y a 8 000 ans. Le projet EXPLO, financé par l’UE, propose une méthode interdisciplinaire innovante pour étudier les interfaces entre les modes de vie de l’homme, l’utilisation des sols et l’environnement passés. Il aura recours à une combinaison unique de méthodes de modélisation archéologique, biologique et mathématique dynamique (bayésienne) appliquées à la dendrochronologie et à la datation par radiocarbone pour constituer des chronologies de colonisation hautement précises. EXPLO associera les informations sur site issues des fouilles à des données paléoenvironnementales hors site afin d’identifier les stratégies d’adaptation passées.
Objectif
European societies today face unprecedented environmental change. Understanding how human societies responded to past challenges of environmental change relates to the interface between culture and environment. The EXPLO project proposes a novel interdisciplinary approach to investigate key questions regarding the interaction between past human ways of life, land use and the wider environment through a unique combination of archaeological, biological and dynamic mathematical modelling approaches.
Archaeological prehistoric sites in lakes of northern Greece and the southern Balkans provide an excellent opportunity to investigate rich archives of societal and environmental change in the cradle of European farming. Natural lake sediments and submerged prehistoric settlements offer exceptional preservation conditions and uniquely holistic insights into past anthroposphere, biosphere and geosphere dynamics. More than 8,000 years ago, technological and social breakthroughs allowed the introduction of farming from western Asia to Greece and thus for the first time to Europe; however, so far there is no high-resolution picture of how this revolutionary innovation interacted with the environment, including its long-term consequences.
New underwater archaeological research will allow the construction of highly precise settlement chronologies on the basis of dendrochronology, radiocarbon dating and Bayesian modelling. On-site information from excavations will be combined with off-site palaeoenvironmental data from the same lakes to investigate past adaptation strategies to the environment as well as the effects of past societies on their environments. Dynamic models integrating archaeological contexts and palaeoenvironmental data will open up the opportunity to investigate vulnerability, resilience, tipping points and thresholds of ancient agrarian economies, with implications for future food systems under a rapidly changing climate.
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ERC-SyG - Synergy grantInstitution d’accueil
3012 Bern
Suisse