Session: #957

Content:

Prehistoric research responds to a demanding scientific programme aimed at replicating the ethnographers' emphasis on human social relationships, economic strategies, technical procedures, interpersonal variability, and material culture.
This Palethnological approach (based on complementary analytical tools, such as techno-typological analysis, raw material identification, and site catchment analysis) requires a thorough exploitation of each site’s archaeological remains (both artifacts and ecofacts) informative potential, to reconstruct the groups’ everyday routines, but also their subsistence strategies and normative cultural structures.
This approach also broadens the archaeologist’s horizons by placing each site within the context of the territory(/ies) defined by the movement of objects, people, and ideas deduced from intra-site analyses. Recent research stresses site complementarity and, occasionally, surprisingly large territories or circulation areas.
However, these interpretative efforts frequently struggle with fragmentary and incomplete knowledge of the ecological context and landscapes in which the prehistoric groups evolved.
Although this lack of information is often due to insufficient Palaeogeographic and Palaeoenvironmental reconstructions of past landscapes, as well as the alea of archaeological preservation, regional studies have highlighted the methodological difficulties in understanding the groups’ adaptations to landscapes still largely unknown to us.
While large stretches of shoreline are currently underwater because of Holocene sea-level rise, which prevents us from knowing vital information about the economic adaptation to these unique, rich ecosystems, the recent interactions between the effects of climate change and growing anthropogenic artificialization of the landscape further limit our ability to access important archaeological data, or even wipe it out entirely.
Contributions are expected to focus on:
1. Data collection and surveys in environments difficult to access, destroyed, or submerged.
2. The palaeogeographic/palaeoecological reconstruction of lost landscapes.
3.Regional interpretations of human cultural responses to these ill known territories.
4. Resilience and mitigation projects for climate change and anthropogenic artificialization impacts on archaeological resources.

Session: #957

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