SW Asia (Eastern Turkey, Iraq and Iran) is an important region for paleoclimate and paleoenvironmental research as it is a sensitive hotspot to climate change, where water availability, as an often scarce and unequally distributed resource, is a key-parameter for societal stability today and in the past. Climate in SW Asia is influenced by two major climate systems; the North Atlantic/Siberian pressure system in winter and the Indian monsoon in summer. To date the interaction between these systems remains highly uncertain, warranting further investigations. In addition, SW Asia is a key-region where three of the most fundamental transformations in human history took place; the rise of agriculture and emergence of advanced complex societies and the development of the first cities, states and empires. It is very likely that both climatic and environmental conditions were important factors contributing to these profound socio-cultural transformations, some of them led to the rise and fall of empires.

Our understanding of the causes and patterns of climatic changes and their influence on the environment in SW Asia has remained uncertain due to the brevity of instrumental records and scarcity of precisely-dated and highly resolved climatic and environmental reconstructions. To go beyond scarce existing reconstructions, MITRA (named after the Indo-Iranian god and spirit of the rain and of the sun) will develop a dense network of different paleo records and climate model simulations to understand past changes of the complex climate in SW Asia, in particular the hydroclimate. We will use the most promising and most widespread archives in SW Asia, namely speleothems, lake and marine sediments along a nearly 2,000 km-long N-S transect stretching from Eastern Turkey to the Persian Gulf. Such a comprehensive approach will allow us to develop a network of precisely-dated multi-proxy multi-archive climatic and environmental records. These records will form a unique confluence of numerous physical, chemical and biological parameters to reconstruct a wide range of climatic and environmental variables, thereby reducing the uncertainties associated with the interpretation of single parameter studies. Moreover, a dense network of paleorecords is required to address the great spatial heterogeneity of climate in SW Asia; connecting the gap between the more widely studied European, Mediterranean and Central Asian regions. The new climatic and environmental network created by MITRA will be compared to high resolution climate model simulations, which generate process understanding of long- and short-term climate variability in SW Asia. The climate model simulations will be extended into the future so that future climate change will be placed into context of millennia long climate variability. Furthermore, MITRA will provide the data that are urgently needed by archaeologists and historian to investigate the climatic-environmental-human connections in the recent and distant past.

Research on climate variability and species distribution has gained momentum in geography and archaeology. It is motivated by the wish to understand the mechanisms behind the driving forces through detailed analysis of the past and to raise awareness of the effects of global warming on different time scales. While this has inspired the formulation of new hypotheses and theories of past environmental and population development, much of the old questions, such as the dynamics and the processes of floral and faunal spread, remain pivotal. In addition, the availability of large datasets enables (and likewise complicates) quantitative and qualitative analysis of supraregional distribution patterns, increasingly including scientific data analysis, such as palaeoclimatic proxy data, (stable) isotopes, aDNA, archaeobotanical, and -zoological data. Merging this invaluable data assemblage, however, is key to understand large-scale socio-cultural transformation processes. EXOCHAINS addresses this challenge by integrating Holocene environmental variability and human response into the chronological analysis of human and agricultural development across Eurasia.Archaeology, palaeoclimatology, and archaeobotany have witnessed massive advances in computational methods, quantitative and qualitative modelling techniques, and spatial analysis during the past years - fueling the re-assessment of ‘old data’ and adding a plethora of new datasets at very high speed. Eventually, this leads to the formulation of new hypotheses and theories, such as the Neolithisation processes across Europe, Holocene climate variability, or domestication strategies of plants and animals. In this context, recent interdisciplinary research between geographical, anthropological, and archaeological institutions has proven to be fruitful to elucidate long-term human-environmental relationships and interactions on the local to the supraregional scale. On this account, computational archaeology has strongly enhanced large data processing in archaeology through the development of increasingly sophisticated and particularly tailored methodological solutions. But while geographic research aims at leaving the regional scale toward continental feedback models, archaeology all too often remains restricted to the local complementary region of a site or regional socio-cultural interactions. Hence, it is surprising that a continental-scale human-environmental system analysis has not yet been worked out. For example, plant and animal dispersal models often focus on Bayesian approaches or ordinary kriging of radiocarbon data but rarely integrate environmental parameters, such as large-scale climate variability from various long-term proxies, soil properties, or ecosystem functionalities. While these approaches are scientifically sound and well-established, adding environmental explanatory covariates to the analysis would increase the spatial and temporal resolution of early plant, animal, and human spread across Eurasia and eventually sharpen the picture of linkages between human mobility patterns and accompanying species dispersal. EXOCHAINS - Exploring Holocene Climate Change and Human Innovations across Eurasia - aims at identifying human response patterns to climate variability and landcover change and to trace interconnectivity of plant and animal dispersal and human population dynamics during the Holocene. The strongly collaborative project enables cross-disciplinary research on high international level, including multiproxy environmental analysis from archaeological and environmental archives. These archives do not only enable the reconstruction of past climatic variability but further provide an invaluable data source to trace human adaptation strategies to changing socio-environmental conditions by adding, for example, calibrated speleothem proxy data, dendroclimatological proxies, (stable) isotope data, and archaeobotanical samples to the analysis. More specifically, the project will re-evaluate the robustness of current methods for studying prehistoric population trends, addressing some of the main criticisms raised in the literature, and finally identifies, which environmental drivers can be used to model the dispersal of humans, plants, and animals.

As Mediterranean societies prepare for the impacts of climate change over the next few decades, a case study to inform their future resilience is associated with one of the defining events in world history: the emergence of Islam in the 7^th century, the subsequent Arab (and later Berber) conquests of the southern and western Mediterranean, their associated population movements and the environmental adaptations that enabled these new societies to flourish. The introduction of new forms of agriculture that transformed the economies of the conquered regions has been previously framed as the “Green Revolution”. Moving beyond the limited focus of earlier research, with its limited spatial and chronological scope, this project will adopt an integrated ecological approach, encompassing plants, animals and soils, from production through to consumption, and compare the impact and legacy of environmental transformations associated with long-term societal change in the “Islamic West” (Iberia and Morocco), beyond the initial Arab/Berber conquests. Adopting a broader chronological span, from the century before the conquests through to the century after the dissolution of the last Islamic polity in Iberia, the transition from Islamic to Christian regimes in Iberia will be compared, for the first time, with the persistence of Islamic polities in northwest Africa, against the backdrop of climatic fluctuations. This will enable relationships between environmental transformations and sequences of political and demographic change to be effectively contextualised. The synergy between our groups will combine regional specialisms with a wealth of scientific expertise, enabling us to conduct the first long-term and inter-regional study of the “Islamic West” to determine how waves of conquest, migration and encounters with resident populations and landscapes drove environmental transformation during this formative period in world history.

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