Paleoenvironmental Conditions of Holocene Southern Mozambique: Multiproxy Data from Coastal Lake Nyalonzelwe Cores

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

To understand the role climate played in facilitating the development and expression of human behaviors, our interdisciplinary research team cored the interdunal Nyalonzelwe lake (Inhambane coast, southern Mozambique) during the summer of 2019. Lake Nyalonzelwe sits 5 m above MSL and is sheltered from the Indian Ocean by a Pleistocene dune system. Its sedimentological record presents over 6m of stratigraphic variability, including a varve sequence spanning the basal 2 m, making it an incredibly rare record of seasonal resolution climatic variability. This multiproxy approach uses both malacological samples and elemental (CNH) approaches to analyze bulk sediment. Dominant mollusk species *Melanoides tuberculata, *Bellamya sp., *Eussoia sp., *Bulinus sp. and *Mactra sp., were imaged using a desktop SEM system, and their calcite:aragonite ratios were determined using ATR-FTIR, creating an intimate look at the environmental parameters of these fresh and brackish water specimens' postmortem environments. Together, these data present a unique signature of paleoenvironmental variability during the last 7500 cal BP years of southern coastal Mozambique, recording signals of human-environmental interactions, and illuminating the importance of climate research in the region. This work was supported by the project PTDC/HAR-ARQ/28148/2017 (Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation).

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• SAA 2021: General Sessions

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32764