From Soil to Society: Local Variability in Inferred Climatic and Environmental Change and Landuse in the Valencian Community, Spain

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Climatic and environmental factors are ‘creeping’ phenomena with rapid thresholds, and there is a disjuncture between product and best-practice in terms of landuse. The ways in which people engage with their environment are necessarily influenced by the nature of the given region, but the form of that engagement is contingent on cultural and historical specificities. This paper targets these negotiations between small-scale land use practices, increasingly "state"-driven macro-economic systems, and changing environmental conditions within the wider historical narratives of colonial expansion in the ancient western Mediterranean (1st millennium BCE). I use novel environmental data and inferred climatic change to contextualize these "glocal" tensions. In short, this research includes the application of a proxy based on a certain class of lipid biomarkers (GDGTS) for relative changes in temperature and pH from excavated material (here faunal remains); thus providing comparable environmental and climatic datasets from sites themselves, avoiding the ambiguity of using indirect geological archives as indicators). The broader Valencian region boasts a relatively large body of work on Holocene climate as well as long-term archaeological research focused on the development of agriculture and diversified regional economies in South Eastern Spain, and thus serves as the primary case study.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 26190