Theme:
7. Archaeology of Sustainability through World Crises, Climate Change and War
Session format:
Session with presentation of 6 slides in 6 minutes
Title:
Exploring Ancient Solutions for Modern Challenges: Archaeological Insights into Food Systems and Adaptations to Changing Environments
Content:
The world is facing intensified rates of adverse climate and environmental change, population growth, and food insecurity. However, challenges that face us today are not totally new and many past societies have struggled with similar issues. But perspectives from the past remain underutilized. In this context, studying human-environment interactions, subsistence strategies, and human and plant response to changing environmental conditions is the most obvious way for archaeology to contribute to the global quest for sustainable solutions to cope with current challenges.
In this session, we are seeking to put together interdisciplinary studies that investigate past food systems in the light of deteriorating paleoclimatic and paleoenvironmental conditions. We focus on two major directions:
1- Which methods, models, and datasets are actually suitable to investigate system changes (i.e., the introduction or abandonment of crops, a shift to new agricultural strategies)?
2- What are examples of past system changes and how can these contribute to current debate on food security and adaptation to changing environmental conditions?
Building on these two pillars, we would like to discuss perspectives in interdisciplinary palaeoenvironmental archaeology and archaeobotany.
We appreciate a balance between local, regional, and supraregional studies to integrate various spatial scales into the discussion. Diachronic studies are particularly welcome to investigate transformation processes over time.
Keywords:
Archaeobotany, Bioarchaeology, Paleoclimatic conditions, Sustainable subsistence strategies, Adaptation, Food security
Session associated with MERC:
no
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:
Margaux Depaermentier (Lithuania) 1
Co-organisers:
Michael Kempf (Switzerland) 2
Giedre Motuzaite Matuzeviciute Keen (Lithuania) 1
Robert Spengler, III (Germany) 3
Affiliations:
1. Vilnius University, Faculty of History, Department of Archaeology, Lithuania
2. University of Basel, Department of Environmental Sciences, Quaternary Geology, Switzerland
3. Max Planck Instiitute of Geoanthropology
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