3. Environmental changes and shifting marine baselines: Exploring the resistance/resilience of Mediterranean marine stocks under past environmental changes

This part will assess the first of two research questions that structure this project, by exploring the impact of environmental changes on ancient Mediterranean marine stocks. The aim is to exploit available palaeo-climatic and palaeo-environmental data (paleoclimatic curves, reconstructed sea surface temperatures based on climatic modelling, ancient sea level and short- or large scale coastal changes) in order to estimate the impact of all these parameters in the availability of coastal/marine resources from the Last Glacial Period (110,000-10,000), to the Holocene glacial retreat (c. 12,000 BP) and down to the Roman Warm Period (250 BC-400 AC). Palaeoenvironmental records will be compared with results produced within MERMAID (marine spectra for each period/ecosystem zone, harvested environments and size composition) to identify potential correlations between marine species fluctuations and changes on a regional or wider Mediterranean scale.

Material/data: archaeozoological data, geomorphological data, palaeoclimatic data.

Techniques: zooarchaeological analysis, isotope analysis, palaeoclimatic curves, statistics, ecological modelling.

Participants: Emna Ben-Lami, Matthieu Ghildardi, Virginie Raybaud, Tatiana Theodoropoulou, tbc