Ecology of the past

This year I have a two week slot in the “Science in Archaeology 2” program that is part of the Minor “Archaeology Today: (Digital) science in Archaeology”. In my section of the course we have covered three key topics this year: humans and fire, humans and animals, and humans and domestication. For each topic there was a lecture and a discussion component, and students got to present their favourite scientific paper on one of these topics.

This year discussions have been particularly fun as we have such a broad range of students taking the minor. In addition to the ‘usual’ archaeologists we have, among others, historians, data science and environmental science students from a range of universities across the Netherlands. So regardless of your background if you are interested in archaeology then maybe this minor is for you…

Papers studied this year were:

Two of our field days for the University of Amsterdam (UvA) BSc Palaeoecology course took place in the heathland around Hilversum. This region is particularly interesting for exploring past environmental change because it includes glacial topography from the Saalian glaciation (c. 300,000-130,000 years ago), evidence of polar deserts from end of the last ice age (c. 20,000 years ago), and ancient soils which contain evidence of past landscapes during the Holocene (last 11,700 years). Furthermore, burial mounds and other earth works provide evidence of the thousands of years of human habitation and landscape modification.

During the excisions we visited the local geology museum (Geologisch Museum Hofland) to get an overview of the landscape, collected data to characterise the local vegetation, and discovered buried soils containing evidence of landscapes during the medieval period (c. 1500-500 years ago), the mid-Holocene (c. 5,000-6,000 years ago) and the end of the last ice age.

The fifth in Mapping Ancient Africa (MAA) online seminar series will take place on Monday 11 April at 17:00 CEST. This seminar will focus on past vegetation change in Africa.

• Speakers:  Sarah Ivory, Lynne Quick and Rahab Kinyanjui
• Title: “The African Pollen Database, state of the art and best practices”

The seminar will be delivered via Zoom. The link for the seminar can be obtained from the MAA Slack page, or from seminar chair and chaired by William Gosling. 

For more about the African Pollen Database check out:

• Palaeoecology of Africa, Volume 35 “Quaternary Vegetation Dynamics: The African Pollen Database”. Click here to download the whole volume free from the publishers web site.
• The African Pollen Database web site

For further information on seminars in this series visit the MAA schedule page.

9TH EARLY CAREER RESEARCHER MEETING Integrating Tropical Ecology Across Biomes and Continents 29-31 March 2017 LANCASTER ENVIRONMENT CENTRE, LANCASTER UNIVERSITY Join us at Lancaster Environment Ce…

Source: BES TEG ECRM 2017