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).

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 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).

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).

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 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