Late Glacial rapid climate change and human response in the Westernmost Mediterranean (Iberia and Morocco)

Abstract

This paper investigates the correlation between climate, environment and human land use in the Westernmost Mediterranean on both sides of the Strait of Gibraltar during the Late Glacial. Using a multi-proxy approach on a sample of 300 sites from the Solutrean and Magdalenian of the Iberian Peninsula and from the Iberomaurusian in Morocco, we find evidence for significant changes in settlement patterns and site density after the Last Glacial Maximum. In Southern Iberia, during Heinrich Stadial 1, hyperarid zones expanded drastically from the south-eastern coast to the West through the Interior. This aridification process heavily affected Magdalenian settlement in the South and caused a strong decline of hunter-gatherer population. Southern Iberia during Heinrich Stadial 1 turned out to be a high-risk environment when compared to Northern Iberia. At the same time, the Late Iberomaurusian of Morocco, although considered to be situated in a high-risk environment as well, experiences an increase of sites and expansion of settlement area.

State of the Art in Paleoenvironment Mapping for Modeling Applications in Archeology—Summary, Conclusions, and Future Directions from the PaleoMaps Workshop

“…Site pattern analysis can also tell us a lot about settlement histories of hunter-gatherers. Kernel Density Estimation and Ripley's K analysis results allow us to identify settlement hubs; the distribution of these tells us which areas in the landscape were particularly suitable for human settlement, such as the Southern and Northern coastlines of the IP during the Last Glacial Maximum [18]. These analyses also allow the identification of settlement breakdowns, as we can see for Heinrich 1 in the Southeast of the IP.…”

“…The first day of the workshop dealt with the question of how to compile spatiotemporal data sets (i.e., PaleoMaps), that can be applied in modeling applications such as agent-based models (ABMs) [11][12][13], species distribution models (SDMs) [14][15][16] or any other geospatial modeling applications within the paleoenvironmental and archeological domain [17,18]. On the second day, this was followed by presentations addressing specific aspects of how to make use of explicit paleoenvironmental models and data (i.e., PaleoMaps) in exemplary human-environment interaction modeling applications.…”

“…There has been and continues to be a long discussion about the asynchronous patterns of human occupation and adaptation between the Northern and Southern regions of the IP. Studies such as [18,80] show that climate events impacted the lives of the hunter-gatherer societies of the Western Mediterranean, but oftentimes the exact nature of this influence and its effect on human mobility is not known. This is why, especially in the past few years, there has been an increase in the application of modeling approaches to the archeological data record of the IP, in order to describe in more detail the effects of climate change on human societies.…”

“…Especially HEs 4 to 1 seem to have impacted the human population histories on the IP, leading to bottlenecks and subsequent local and/or regional extinction events [81]. An example of this is the decrease in precipitation during HE 1 in the Southeast of the IP [80], which may have led to a local population breakdown [18]. Related to this approach-comparing models of climate history with settlement history-is the modeling of habitat suitability [82,83], which helps us to not only understand human dispersal and distribution, but also human adaptive flexibility and allows us to identify important climate parameters influencing human dispersal range.…”

“…On a more regional scale, the IP is the perfect test case to analyse human-environment interactions. Our research group has been working on linking archeological sites back to the landscape, which can tell us how the human groups interacted with the landscape as well as each other [18] (see Figure 16). This can then be connected to climate changes.…”