Ecological Archaeologies of the Afrotropics

The growing climate crisis and threats to biodiversity have alerted the scientific community of the need to develop a clearer understanding of what has driven landscape changes and how these have impacted biodiversity and ecosystems. The lack of observationally constrained quantitative estimates of those impacts have led to large differences in the scenarios currently used for climate simulations. Nowhere is this more pressing than in the Afrotropics—a biogeographical region of nearly one billion people who are among the most vulnerable to the effects of global climate change. EcoArch brings together expertise in archaeology, geosciences, evolutionary ecology, and land cover modelling to synergistically address fundamental questions about the relationship between humans and the environment over time by documenting landscape changes in the Afrotropics over the last 6000 years. Combining new analytical tools across large landscapes with long occupation histories, we will exponentially expand the quantity and quality of archaeo-ecological data at five geographically diverse sites in Africa and Arabia. Additionally, we will build and logistically support a large regional network of scientists trained and committed to collecting harmonised palaeoecological data. We will conduct state-of-the-art vegetation and fire modelling to determine the relative importance of climate, wildfire, and human activities on landscape changes in the Afrotropics over the last six millennia. These efforts will result in robust local-, regional- and continental-scale land cover and climate reconstructions with a greatly improved spatial and temporal resolution The precision of the datasets we generate will significantly augment inputs to the Earth System Models used to predict future climate changes. EcoArch will establish a conceptual and methodological path for future archaeo-ecological researchers seeking to disentangle human-climate interactions.