Theme:
2. Archaeological Sciences, Humanities and the Digital era: Bridging the Gaps
Session format:
Regular session
Title:
Historical Archaeologies of the Coastal and Fluvial Anthroposphere ? landscapes and structures, combining settlement archaeology and geosciences
Content:
As highlighted in a recent position paper (Werther-Mehler 2021), fluvial landscapes/floodplain environments are global hotspots, particularly sensitive to socioenvironmental changes. Similarly, littoral landscapes, lagoonscapes, shallow shorelines, extensive coastal marshes, with their constantly changing morphology and different resources, proved to be particularly appealing places for human settlement and represent critical contexts for observing settlement dynamics from a diachronic perspective.
On one hand, material culture perspectives (i.e. building and settlement archaeological observations) demonstrate an interdependence between environment, as environmental variability played a fundamental role in shaping material and social structures (construction techniques, productions, infrastructures, or property systems, labour organization and the size of the respective communities). On the other hand, advances in geoarchaeology, palaeoecology, remote sensing techniques and GIS modelling provide increasingly rich views into the dynamics of these systems, and into a variety of factors (e.g. climate, geology, river morphology) influencing the strategies of human communities. Wetland landscapes constantly attracted human populations, yet their dynamic changes (in terms of population size, social organization, landscape environment) posed considerable challenges, requiring adaptation. Although in historical periods, the multicausal nature of anthropogenic forcing mechanisms is better documented, particularly the changing intensity and scale of settlement (contraction-expansion), fundamentally influencing land-cover changes, and also fluvial responses, large scale patterns are less well understood.
Our session adopts a multiperiod-approach, from pre-Roman to late medieval times, inviting papers that
- provide a regional/sub-regional perspective
- investigate "short" or "long durée" human adaptation strategies in specific landscapes
- contrast environmental “determinism” (constraints) and eco-possibilism (human adaptation)
- demonstrate the combined use of geoscientific and settlement archaeological methods to reconstruct past human activities, environmental change, crisis management-resilience strategies
- study settlement structure/distribution dynamics in relation to environmental/socio-economic factors (relevant from the point of view of wetland management)
- track responses of human communities to environmental change (flooding, erosion, other hazards)
Keywords:
fluvial anthroposphere, geoarchaeology, GIS modelling, settlement archaeology, landscape archaeology, from Roman to medieval times
Session associated with MERC:
yes
Session associated with CIfA:
no
Session associated with SAfA:
no
Session associated with CAA:
no
Session associated with DGUF:
no
Session associated with other:
Main organiser:
Laszlo Ferenczi (Czech Republic) 1
Co-organisers:
Martina Bergamo (Italy) 2
Jacopo Paiano (Italy) 2
Rowin van Lanen (Netherlands) 3
Csilla Zatykó (Hungary) 4
Affiliations:
1. Department of Archaeology, Charles University
2. Ca' Foscari University of Venice
3. The Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands
4. HUN-REN Institute of Archaeology, Research Centre for the Humanities
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