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.
Today, the evident non-commensurability of cultural taxa in archaeology has not been resolved - on the contrary. This particular issue may seem opaque and rather academic but it is of central importance if our goal is to understand how and why cultures change. If our units of analysis are flawed, our results will inevitably be spurious. This, in turn, is important for society at large because archaeology provides important insights about how climate change shapes the course of historical developments. Attributing culture change to climate drivers needs to b robust, however, so using well-defined analytical units and transparent and replicable methods is essential.
CLIOARCH overall objectives are to first define – quantitatively and replicably - robust ‘palaeocultural’ analytical units using computational tools, then to feed these forward into algorithmic environments that allow us to relate their spatial and temporal distribution to climatic and topographic parameters using so-called eco-cultural niche modelling. Finally, CLIOARCH seeks to ground-proof these computational analyses via fieldwork.
