Late Quaternary sea-level change and early human societies in the central and eastern Mediterranean Basin : an interdisciplinary review

This article reviews key data and debates focused on relative sea-level changes since the Last Interglacial (approximately the last 132,000 years) in the Mediterranean Basin, and their implications for past human populations. Geological and geomorphological landscape studies are critical to archaeology. Coastal regions provide a wide range of resources to the populations that inhabit them. Coastal landscapes are increasingly the focus of scholarly discussions from the earliest exploitation of littoral resources and early hominin cognition, to the inundation of the earliest permanently settled fishing villages and eventually, formative centres of urbanisation. In the Mediterranean, these would become hubs of maritime transportation that gave rise to the roots of modern seaborne trade. As such, this article represents an original review of both the geo-scientific and archaeological data that specifically relate to sea-level changes and resulting impacts on both physical and cultural landscapes from the Palaeolithic until the emergence of the Classical periods. Our review highlights that the interdisciplinary links between coastal archaeology, geomorphology and sea-level changes are important to explain environmental impacts on coastal human societies and human migration. We review geological indicators of sea level and outline how archaeological features are commonly used as proxies for measuring past sea levels, both gradual changes and catastrophic events. We argue that coastal archaeologists should, as a part of their analyses, incorporate important sea-level concepts, such as indicative meaning. The interpretation of the indicative meaning of Roman fishtanks, for example, plays a critical role in reconstructions of late Holocene Mediterranean sea levels. We identify avenues for future work, which include the consideration of glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) in addition to coastal tectonics to explain vertical movements of coastlines, more research on Palaeolithic island colonisation, broadening of Palaeolithic studies to include materials from the entire coastal landscape and not just coastal resources, a focus on rescue of archaeological sites under threat by coastal change, and expansion of underwater archaeological explorations in combination with submarine geomorphology. This article presents a collaborative synthesis of data, some of which have been collected and analysed by the authors, as the MEDFLOOD (MEDiterranean sea-level change and projection for future FLOODing) community, and highlights key sites, data, concepts and ongoing debates

Karst landforms and prehistoric settlement patterns: a case study from Korčula Island (Croatia)

This study is aimed at testing if and how a detailed assessment of geomorphological features in the territory nearby can complement palaeoenvironmental evidence revealed by the archaeological stratigraphy from a cave site. In the test site, located in the western part of the Adriatic island of Korčula (central Dalmatian coast, Croatia), the stratigraphy of the prehistoric cave settlement of Vela Spila reveals a tight relationship between postglacial environmental changes and human settlement patterns. In this work the territory outside the cave was investigated from a geomorphological point of view. A 1:25000 scale geomorphological map of the western part of the island was created through remote sensing and field survey. Two cores were drilled in Blatsko Polje, a large karst depression shaping the western part of the island to verify if the sediment record trapped in the depression was a suitable candidate for future palaeoenvironmental studies. The geomorphological context was also related to archaeological evidence from surface archaeological surveys in Western Korčula. The result of these combined methods shows a karst landscape typical of the Dalmatian coast and highly influenced by the island’s underlying structural and tectonic characteristics, with several landforms such as debris flows and pocket valleys indicating possible episodes of wetter, more erosive conditions both before and after the last ice age. The sediment cores from the Blatsko Polje, which is now artificially drained, show previous phases of intermittent flooding and a drier episode that led to the area being exploited more by humans in the Neolithic (8-4 ka BP). This is indicated both by the placement of archaeological sites of different phases around the Polje, and by finds of lithics, pottery, and microfauna in the cores themselves. Geomorphological analysis supports evidence of a tight relationship between environmental changes and human settlement patterns inferred from the cave stratigraphy and provides some information on the features of the landscape exploited by the cave dwellers. Finally, the polje infill proved to be a potential palaeoenvironmental archive (albeit an unusual one), that would warrant future investigation with higher resolution core samplin

Human adaptation to changing coastal landscapes in the Eastern Adriatic: Evidence from Vela Spila cave, Croatia

In this paper new palaeogeographic and archaeological data from the prehistoric cave Vela Spila on the island of Korčula in Croatia are combined with new realizations of two glacial isostatic adjustment models in order to present relative sea-level change scenarios confronting the inhabitants of the cave at different time slices and to show how they experienced and adapted to sea-level and climate change from the Late Pleistocene through the Holocene. Our results show that from the Late Upper Palaeolithic until the Mesolithic, humans in the study area would have experienced tens of metres of sea-level rise, at rates in some cases up to 12 mm per year, and, owing to the relatively flat morphology of the now submerged plains, hundreds of meters of horizontal coastline change in the plains to the north and south of the island. This evidence supports the hypothesis that the rapid loss of these plains likely contributed to the human abandonment of the cave after the Palaeolithic for about five thousand years, followed by significant changes in lifestyle and diet in the Mesolithic. Our results have important implications for the study of how past human groups, especially in vulnerable coastal areas, were affected by sea level, climate, and other environmental changes. Vela Spila represents a case study of how changing environment and rising seas can force significant alterations inH2020 - British Academ

Variazioni relative del livello marino e subsidenza in alto Adriatico: la banca dati “SU&SO”

Le ricostruzioni dei livelli eustatici passati e le previsioni future si basano soprattutto su modelli geofisici che valutano l’aggiustamento della superficie terrestre al variare delle masse glacio-isostatiche. Uno dei punti deboli di questo approccio è spesso il limitato numero di punti di controllo che confrontino i dati predetti dai modelli con le realtà di terreno. Per superare questo ostacolo, negli ultimi anni sono stati raccolti numerosi dati, avviando nuove ricerche sul campo e catalogando le informazioni pregresse tramite l’analisi della letteratura esistente, anche molto locale e di difficile reperimento [ad es. Antonioli et al., 2009]. Il progetto “Studio delle variazioni eustatiche e della subsidenza in Alto Adriatico negli ultimi 130.000 anni attraverso indicatori geomorfologici, stratigrafici e geoarcheologici”, finanziato nel 2010 dall’Università di Padova, ha tra i suoi obiettivi quello di realizzare un database che raccolga gli indicatori relativi ai livelli marini olocenici. Il database è stato denominato Su&So (Subsidence & Sea-level Observations), che in molti dialetti alto adriatici significa “su e giù”. Questa banca dati è pensata per integrarsi con quella del progetto INQUA MEDFLOOD (MEDiterranean sea-level change and projection for future FLOODing, www.medflood.org), costruita per l’intero Mediterraneo. Lungo la costa bassa tra Monfalcone e il delta del Po gli indicatori maggiormente considerati sono i depositi lagunari che ricoprono in onlap la pianura alluvionale preesistente. Essi sono piuttosto diffusi e vengono ritenuti ben rappresentativi del livello marino esistente durante la loro deposizione, con un errore massimo associato tra -2 e +0,5 m. Indicatori simili sono presenti lungo la costa rocciosa dell’Istria, specie nelle valli a rias, parzialmente riempite da depositi paralici olocenici, come nel caso dei fiumi Mirna, Raša e delle baie di Pirano e Capodistria. Lungo la costa occidentale, il confronto tra aree diverse, anche se vicine fra loro, evidenzia il peso delle variabili geologiche nella risposta eustatica locale, in particolare la compattazione differenziale dei depositi olocenici e i diversi tassi di deformazione crostale. Per stimare i tassi di subsidenza tettonica su lungo termine, e rendere più evidenti le deformazioni oloceniche, sono stati realizzati alcuni carotaggi fino a 105 m di profondità in modo da valutare la quota dei depositi lagunari del MIS 5.e. Tra i nuovi dati sono di particolare interesse le misure condotte sui marker stratigrafici e geoarcheologici connessi all’età del Bronzo Recente e Finale (1350-1000 a.C.), che consentono di ricostruire la curva RSL per un periodo finora poco analizzato