Session: #267

Regular session

Coasts have long been hypothesised as key areas for human populations due to being very relevant areas for sourcing protein, essential for reproductive and cognitive success and, in turn, stimulating technological and cultural innovation. Also, they are seen as crucial areas for the rapid dispersal of our genus out of Africa, before becoming sites of increasingly sedentary societies around shell middens in the Mesolithic period of Europe, for example. Therefore, increasing our knowledge on the role of coastal environments for hominids throughout Prehistory is crucial for better understanding human-environment interactions, but also forager and first farmer subsistence strategies, among other very relevant aspects, such as the diffusion of the economic and technical innovations occurred during the Pleistocene and Early/Middle Holocene. In this session, we aim for studies focusing on human populations that inhabited littoral areas along Europe from the Lower Palaeolithic to the Neolithic. From a more specific point of view, we are very interested in littoral resource exploitation patterns and its management throughout time, human occupation, and mobility patterns along the coasts, and archaeological sites’ formation processes. We also want to focus on paleoenvironmental reconstruction and climate change implications for human ecology across the Atlantic and Mediterranean Europe, as well as the role played by marine environments during climate anomalies. Nevertheless, all those papers that study of the modus vivendi of hominids in littoral areas are welcomed.
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European coast, Marine environments, Paleoclimate reconstruction, Human ecology, Subsistence strategies

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PaM

Asier García-Escárzaga (Spain) ^1,2

Carlos Simões (Portugal) ³
Patricia Monteiro (Portugal) ^3,4
Rita Dias (Portugal) ^3,5
Alejandro Sierra Sainz-Aja (France) ⁶