Project description
Shedding new light on early agricultural societies
The focus of traditional archaeological studies is usually on how societies and livelihoods evolved, not how they persisted over time. The EU-funded SUSTAIN project will shed light on how Neolithic societies in Europe (which resettled in new locations) interacted with the environment in respect to the life cycle of animals and plants. The project will draw on theories from anthropology, biogeography, bioarchaeology and complexity science. It will apply correlative species distribution models (SDMs) to investigate the relationship of domesticates' past range expansions and climate. By deriving past agropastoral practices from isotope signals in animal and plant remains, it will assess parameters of crop and livestock productivity comparing agropastoral achievement across time and space. The project will also investigate how and why the fragmentation of relationships forced expansion into new areas.
Objective
The aim of SUSTAIN is to elucidate how early agricultural societies in Europe maintained their capacity to self-generate and persist through time. It examines societies that have only recently settled in new environments and begun to practice mixed agro-pastoral husbandry. This at the time novel way of interaction with the environment involved a different scale of interference with the life cycles of plants and animals, and was of fundamental importance for subsequent developments in Europe. While archaeological research traditionally centres on the question of how societies and livelihoods changed, the project asks what made them capable to carry on, i.e. to remain sustainable. The project weaves together approaches from social anthropology, biogeography, bioarchaeology and complexity science in a manner that has not been attempted previously. We will examine the relationship of domesticates’ past range expansions and climate using correlative species distribution models (SDMs) and will derive past agropastoral practices from isotope signals in plant and animal remains. Novel approaches of quantitative inference will allow us to estimate parameters of crop and livestock productivity and to directly compare agropastoral performance across time and space in Europe. Using this knowledge, we will employ spatially explicit agent-based simulation to explore the social parameters of growth and decline of the first agricultural societies in Europe in previously unconsidered detail. We will examine the role of social webs of lateral insurance in colonising populations, and the extent to which fragmentation of these relationships constrained population expansion into new regions. The project will produce insights that challenge conventional wisdom about farming and environmental sustainability, particularly in regard to social connectedness, relations of sharing, and mobility, which will have value and impact beyond archaeology.
Fields of science
- agricultural sciencesagriculture, forestry, and fisheriesagriculture
- social sciencessociologyanthropologysocial anthropology
- agricultural sciencesanimal and dairy sciencedomestic animalsanimal husbandry
- humanitieshistory and archaeologyarchaeologybioarchaeology
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesphysical geography
Keywords
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
ERC-COG - Consolidator GrantHost institution
55122 Mainz
Germany