Suchergebnisse

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7-2007-2013) (Grant agreement No. 323727).

The history of climate and environmental change in the lands around the Mediterranean Sea is dramatic, and our still emerging understanding has changed radically over the last 60 years and is still changing. Pioneering pollen work by Bonatti (1966) first provided evidence that relative to the Holocene (the last 11,500 years) the Late Pleistocene was a time of drought and cold in the region. But for many years alternative viewpoints held currency, especially the work of Vita-Finzi (1969) who held, on the basis of widespread Late Pleistocene gravels, that this had been a period of high precipitation. This view was finally laid to rest only in the 1980s and 1990s by further pollen work on lacustrine deposits (e.g. Bertoldi 1980; Bottema & Woldring 1984; Alessio et al. 1986; Follieri et al. 1988; Bottema et al. 1990), and analysis of the sedimentology and biotic components of Late Pleistocene gravels (e.g. Barker & Hunt 1995). Vita-Finzi (1969) did, however, pioneer the recognition of the scale and impact of climatic variability within the Holocene in countries bordering the Mediterranean at a time when most researchers thought of the period as extremely stable climatically. Recognition of this climatic variability and its impacts was made more complex because of very strong patterns of human impacts in some Mediterranean countries, which were difficult to disentangle unequivocally from the climatic signal (e.g. Hunt 1998; Grove & Rackham 2003). Only with the rise of isotope-based palaeoclimate studies and high-resolution dating did it become possible to separate the climatic and anthropogenic signals (e.g. Sadori et al. 2008). More recent work has started to show that within the Mediterranean Basin the overall trend and timing of Holocene climate change differs from region to region (Peyron et al. 2011). In broad terms, the northeast and southwest of the basin seem to be in phase, with a dry Early Holocene becoming more humid after c. 4000 cal. bc, while the northwest and southeast show an opposite trend with a wetter Early Holocene and progressive desiccation after c. 4000 cal. bc (Hunt et al. 2007). Within this very broad pattern there are considerable regional differences (e.g. Finné et al. 2011) and in the central Mediterranean, changes in seasonality are superimposed on these trends (Peyron et al. 2011, 2017). [excerpt] ; This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7-2007-2013) (Grant agreement No. 323727). ; peer-reviewed

The appendix consists of the deep core borehole logs. ; This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7-2007-2013) (Grant agreement No. 323727). ; peer-reviewed

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7-2007-2013) (Grant agreement No. 323727).

Molluscs often have quite specific environmental requirements (Evans 1978, 82; Giusti et al. 1995; Schembri et al. 2018). Many species require only a few square metres of habitat, so they are excellent micro-habitat indicators. Their shells can be dispersed, for instance by running water, but generally, compared with other biotic materials used in palaeoecology (such as pollen grains or seeds), they do not disperse far from their life habitat and therefore provide important indications of local environments. Alkaline sediments, which are very common in the Maltese Islands, will preserve molluscan shells and other calcareous biogenic material over thousands of years. This makes the analysis of molluscan shells potentially a very important tool for the reconstruction of past environments in Malta. Geologists and archaeologists recognized the value of molluscs as palaeoenvironmental indicators as early the first quarter of the nineteenth century ad (Conybeare 1824; Preece 1998; Evans & O'Connor 2005, 41). Molluscan analysis is still, however, comparatively rare as a palaeoenvironmental tool, and for instance is less commonly used than pollen analysis (e.g. Preece 1998, 158; Fenech 2007). In the Maltese Islands, the application of the technique has been limited and there has been no comprehensive palaeoenvironmental study using molluscan analysis. Trechmann (1938), Giusti et al. (1995) and Hunt (1997) used the sporadic occurrence of land snails in Maltese Quaternary deposits as an indication that these had accumulated in open, exposed conditions. The highly cemented Quaternary deposits precluded anything other than the production of species lists by these authors. Pedley (1980) suggested a brackish depositional environment for the Pleistocene Fiddien Valley Tufa on molluscan evidence. Fenech (2007) and Marriner et al. (2012) analysed cores taken in Holocene estuarine deposits at Marsa and Burmarrad, respectively. These studies showed the progress of the Holocene marine transgression and the infilling of the estuaries, and Fenech (2007) also showed the persistence of open, exposed terrestrial environments in the catchment of the Marsa estuary over c. 7000 years. At the Neolithic Xagħra Brochtorff Circle (Schembri et al. 2009) and the Neolithic and later temple site at Tas-Silġ (Fenech & Schembri 2015), molluscan analysis demonstrated long histories of anthropogenic disturbance and sparse vegetation since the later Neolithic, but a considerable portion of these studies was done on shells recovered by troweling and dry sieving with a large fraction and therefore subject to a form of taphonomic bias caused by the exclusion of most very small taxa. Analysis of a cave fill near Victoria on Gozo, based on assemblages recovered by sieving, identified a phase of spectacular erosion caused by Classical period agricultural practices, followed by a more stable grazed landscape in the Medieval and post-Medieval periods (Hunt & Schembri 2018). Inevitably, the research done before the start of the FRAGSUS Project was very partial in coverage. The environmental history of the Maltese Islands was still largely unknown. [excerpt] ; This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7-2007-2013) (Grant agreement No. 323727). ; peer-reviewed

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7-2007-2013) (Grant agreement No. 323727).

The FRAGSUS Project (Fragility and sustainability in small island environments: adaptation, cultural change and collapse in prehistory) was devised to explore issues of prehistoric island sustainability set against the background of environmental change and instability. Particular foci were the fragility and sustainability of society and environment in the Maltese Islands (Fig. 0.1), primarily during the Neolithic period of the sixth to third millennia bc. Specifically, the research team aimed to understand and explain the nature of the impact of expanding human populations on a restricted, resource-limited and fragile environment such as the Maltese Islands. Our goal was to advance knowledge of the mechanisms and innovations (cultural, technological and political) that traditional (prehistoric) farming societies developed in order to cope with changing resource availability and environmental unpredictability. We sought to understand how some societies managed population impact and sustained their socio-economic system and culture over long periods of time through examining the evidence preserved in the archaeological and palaeoenvironmental records. Island studies have long interested archaeologists and ecologists. An island represents a conveniently circumscribed landscape of known size, surrounded by water, and thus remote from larger landmasses and their biological and cultural stimuli. They are sometimes taken as a microcosm of the situation of the human species in a severely circumscribed and overcrowded planet. From the seminal ecological studies of Charles Darwin (Jones 2009) and Alfred Wallace (1892) in the nineteenth century, to the rich theoretical literature on biogeography and equilibrium theory in islands first initiated by MacArthur and Wilson (1963, 1967), an entire sub-discipline of island studies has developed. The studies range from Simberloff's equilibrium theory (1974), the ecology models of Gorman (1979), ecological anthropology (Vayda & Rappaport 1968) to current ideas of evolution and equilibrium (Lomolino et al. 2010) and colonization (Cox et al. 2016). Generally, the bulk of research has been focused on non-human subjects, with issues of extinctions and conservation foremost, but nevertheless, a number of important theories and models from these island studies are relevant to archaeology. [excerpt] ; This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7-2007-2013) (Grant agreement No. 323727). ; peer-reviewed

The ERC-funded FRAGSUS Project (Fragility and sustainability in small island environments: adaptation, cultural change and collapse in prehistory, 2013–18), led by Caroline Malone (Queens University Belfast) has explored issues of environmental fragility and Neolithic social resilience and sustainability during the Holocene period in the Maltese Islands. This, the first volume of three, presents the palaeo-environmental story of early Maltese landscapes. The project employed a programme of high-resolution chronological and stratigraphic investigations of the valley systems on Malta and Gozo. Buried deposits extracted through coring and geoarchaeological study yielded rich and chronologically controlled data that allow an important new understanding of environmental change in the islands. The study combined AMS radiocarbon and OSL chronologies with detailed palynological, molluscan and geoarchaeological analyses. These enable environmental reconstruction of prehistoric landscapes and the changing resources exploited by the islanders between the seventh and second millennia bc. The interdisciplinary studies combined with excavated economic and environmental materials from archaeological sites allows Temple landscapes to examine the dramatic and damaging impacts made by the first farming communities on the islands' soil and resources. The project reveals the remarkable resilience of the soil-vegetational system of the island landscapes, as well as the adaptations made by Neolithic communities to harness their productivity, in the face of climatic change and inexorable soil erosion. Neolithic people evidently understood how to maintain soil fertility and cope with the inherently unstable changing landscapes of Malta. In contrast, second millennium bc Bronze Age societies failed to adapt effectively to the long-term aridifying trend so clearly highlighted in the soil and vegetation record. This failure led to severe and irreversible erosion and very different and short-lived socio-economic systems across the Maltese islands. ; This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7-2007-2013) (Grant agreement No. 323727). ; peer-reviewed

Index for the publication "Temple landscapes : Fragility, change and resilience of Holocene environments in the Maltese Islands". ; This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7-2007-2013) (Grant agreement No. 323727). ; N/A

The complete bibliography of sources cited in the publication. ; This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7-2007-2013) (Grant agreement No. 323727). ; N/A

The highly fragmented landscape of the Maltese archipelago presents a range of different environments which evolved along different trajectories and presented different constraints and opportunities to its prehistoric inhabitants. It is remarkable how such a small surface area could show such variation and how each phase of the Neolithic responded to that variation. The FRAGSUS Project has yielded a wealth of new data and insights on a number of sites and landscapes across the archipelago and the opportunity is also taken to publish relevant elements of the survey undertaken in the Cambridge Gozo Project undertaken between 1987 and 1995, whose data were analysed by Sara Boyle (Figs. 6.1 & 6.2) in her doctoral dissertation (Boyle 2013; 2014). The picture that is emerging is one of different sites following life-histories that were often divergent (Volume 2). Comparison of these diverging stories allows some broad generalizations to be put forward about the way the inhabitants appropriated, exploited and ordered the landscape. However, given the diversity of life history, we can envisage that the next generation of scholars will uncover further diversity, perhaps even filling what currently appear to be clear gaps during the fifth millennium bc in the total life histories of the islands. Drawing on the rich detail of environmental and archaeological evidence revealed by the project, this chapter will tentatively outline some of the cultural responses to the changing environment that can be made out so far, after a brief analysis of the formal surface surveys undertaken in the Maltese Islands. ; This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7-2007-2013) (Grant agreement No. 323727). ; peer-reviewed

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7-2007-2013) (Grant agreement No. 323727).

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7-2007-2013) (Grant agreement No. 323727).

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7-2007-2013) (Grant agreement No. 323727).

The ERC-funded FRAGSUS Project (Fragility and sustainability in small island environments: adaptation, cultural change and collapse in prehistory, 2013–18), led by Caroline Malone (Queens University Belfast) has explored issues of environmental fragility and Neolithic social resilience and sustainability during the Holocene period in the Maltese Islands. This, the first volume of three, presents the palaeo-environmental story of early Maltese landscapes. The project employed a programme of high-resolution chronological and stratigraphic investigations of the valley systems on Malta and Gozo. Buried deposits extracted through coring and geoarchaeological study yielded rich and chronologically controlled data that allow an important new understanding of environmental change in the islands. The study combined AMS radiocarbon and OSL chronologies with detailed palynological, molluscan and geoarchaeological analyses. These enable environmental reconstruction of prehistoric landscapes and the changing resources exploited by the islanders between the seventh and second millennia bc. The interdisciplinary studies combined with excavated economic and environmental materials from archaeological sites allows Temple landscapes to examine the dramatic and damaging impacts made by the first farming communities on the islands' soil and resources. The project reveals the remarkable resilience of the soil-vegetational system of the island landscapes, as well as the adaptations made by Neolithic communities to harness their productivity, in the face of climatic change and inexorable soil erosion. Neolithic people evidently understood how to maintain soil fertility and cope with the inherently unstable changing landscapes of Malta. In contrast, second millennium bc Bronze Age societies failed to adapt effectively to the long-term aridifying trend so clearly highlighted in the soil and vegetation record. This failure led to severe and irreversible erosion and very different and short-lived socio-economic systems across the Maltese islands. ; This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7-2007-2013) (Grant agreement No. 323727).