EXOCHAINS - Exploring Holocene Climate Change and Human Innovations across Eurasia

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.