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.

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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