Periodic Reporting for period 4 - CLIOARCH (Cliodynamic archaeology: Computational approaches to Final Palaeolithic/earliest Mesolithic archaeology and climate change)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2024-03-01 al 2025-08-31
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.
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.
Across its five Work Packages and its >40 publications, CLIOARCH has provided an in-depth consideration of research history in relation to cultural taxonomy, cultural evolution, and adaptation in the European Final Palaeolithic/earliest Mesolithic. CLIOARCH has experimented with computationally intensive ways of generating novel data - all FAIRLY published - on which these dynamics can be investigated quantitatively and in novel ways. This work has offered many new insights about this period, and about deep-time cultural evolution in general. In parallel, CLIOARCH has generated many new insights about past climate dynamics via novel modelling approaches. Here, the relevance of climatic parameters beyond temperature and precipitation has become evident. These model results, in combination with openly available palaeoclimatic model data, then informed the distribution modelling efforts in CLIOARCH. These efforts have yielded new insights about adaptations at this time, and has provided a platform for engaging with ongoing method development in this domain. As a final cap to CLIOARCH, the project has launched a range of field expeditions to sites in Denmark and Germany - with minor field engagements elsewhere - aimed at re-investigating known sites and finding new sites from this period. In association with local partners and often with the inclusion of students, these expeditions has tasted regional settlement dynamics and provided insights on the early use of amber in art, and provided the as-yet oldest evidence of blue mineral pigment use in Europe.
CLIOARCH project members have presented its many results at meeting, workshops, and conferences globally - to fellow academics and the public alike. The CLIOARCH project has also provided fertile grounds for project ideas and funding applications, some of which have been successful.
CLIOARCH project members have presented its many results at meeting, workshops, and conferences globally - to fellow academics and the public alike. The CLIOARCH project has also provided fertile grounds for project ideas and funding applications, some of which have been successful.
The project has pioneered a fully transparent and replicable – and eminently case-transferable – methodology for the study of material culture change over time, and how this articulates with climate change and extreme environmental events in deep history. In doing so, CLIOARCH has pushed the envelope on a range of fronts: We have developed protocols for the geometric morphometric analysis of tone tool shapes geared towards activating large amounts of legacy data obtained from drawings/photographs. This has not only yielded a range of novel scientific results and in an ERC-PoC application. CLIOARCH's climate models have revealed salient new insights into past weather/climate dynamics, and how these impacted human societies. In addition, we have been applying and developing so-called distribution modelling algorithms/eco-cultural niche modelling to archaeological datasets in order to understand the relations of ancient human communities – by proxy of their archaeological record – to climate and topography. Building on these data-driven in silico efforts, our field expeditions have generated novel information on human behaviour and land-use in the Final Palaeolithic and earliest Mesolithic in Europe.