Macrophysical Climate Model and Comparisons with the Proxy-Based Paleoclimate Reconstruction in Central Anatolian Plain between 14000 and 7000 cal. BP

Summary

Central Anatolian Plain, which was once covered with a Pleistocene lake, witnessed major environmental transformations from the Epipaleolithic to the end of the early Holocene. As the paleolake dried up it exposed valuable resources such as soil and created marshlands where the earliest Neolithic settlements, such as Aşıklıhöyük (10th millennium BP) and Çatalhöyük (9th millennium BP) emerged. These sites represent the first locales of human experimentation with domestication and they represent the establishment of the food producing economies in a different environmental context than the rest of the Southwest Asia. Applying the Macrophysical Climate Model (MCM), a regression-based, local downscaling of a global paleoclimate general circulations model, will provide retrodictions of past precipitation and temperature at 100-year resolution. The results of MCM can then be compared to the results of proxy-based reconstructions. Cross–comparison of reconstruction methods will not only enable us to identify the level of correlation between different methods, hence increasing the reliability of retrodictions based on numeric models, but it will also allow us to use quantifiable results from MCM in stochastic and agent–based models of land use. Such models will be used in developing and testing hypotheses about human adaptive behavior and processes of decision-making.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• ‘Calibrating’ Palaeoclimatology-informed Research in Old World Archaeology: Data, Methods and Theories

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