Descripción del proyecto
Un nuevo método para estudiar la adaptación humana al clima
El cambio climático, las migraciones y la adaptación son desafíos que exigen soluciones inmediatas a nivel mundial. El Pleistoceno superior y el Holoceno inferior en Europa, también un periodo de cambio climático turbulento, representa un laboratorio natural ideal para la investigación de las reacciones humanas ante tales desafíos. Sin embargo, siguen siendo escasos los estudios que comprenden los cambios documentados en arqueología utilizando estrategias epistemológicamente robustas y metodológicamente transparentes. El proyecto financiado con fondos europeos CLIOARCH ofrece un método novedoso de ciencia abierta para cuestionar la relación entre los antiguos humanos y su medio ambiente. Aprovechará la teoría evolutiva cultural y una variedad de métodos computacionales adaptados de la ecología para crear una metodología pionera sobre el estudio del efecto del cambio climático en la historia profunda. Esta metodología transparente y cuantitativa, junto con los descubrimientos que genere, potenciará el papel de la investigación arqueológica en los debates actuales sobre el cambio climático.
Objetivo
Late Pleistocene/early Holocene Europe is said to be the ideal laboratory for the investigation of human responses to rapidly changing climates and environments, migration and adaptation. Yet, pinpointing precisely how and why contemporaneous Final Palaeolithic/earliest Mesolithic (15,000-11,000 years BP) foragers migrated, and which environmental or other factors they adapted to – or failed to – has remained remarkably elusive. At the core of ClioArch is the radical but, in light of research-historical insights, necessary hypothesis that the current archaeological cultural taxonomy for this iconic period of European prehistory is epistemologically flawed and that operationalisations and interpretations based on this traditional taxonomy – especially those that seek to relate observed changes in material culture and land-use to contemporaneous climatic and environmental changes – are therefore problematic. Hence, novel approaches to crafting the taxonomic building blocks are required, as are novel analyses of human|environment relations in this period. ClioArch’s premier ambition is to provide operational cultural taxonomies for the Final Palaeolithic/earliest Mesolithic of Europe and to couple these with interdisciplinary cultural evolutionary, quantitative ecological methods and field archaeological investigations beyond the state-of-the-art, so as to better capture such adaptations – almost certainly with major implications for the standard culture-historical narrative relating to this period. In so doing, the project will pioneer a fully transparent and replicable – and eminently transferable – methodology for the study of the impacts of climate change and extreme environmental events in deep history. In turn, such a quantitative understanding of past adaptive dynamics will position archaeology more centrally in contemporary debates about climate change, environmental catastrophe and their cultural dimensions.
Ámbito científico
Palabras clave
Programa(s)
Régimen de financiación
ERC-COG - Consolidator GrantInstitución de acogida
8000 Aarhus C
Dinamarca