S - Supraregional Systems - SFB 806 - Our Way to Europe

Collaborative Research Centre 806
Our Way to Europe

Culture-Environment Interaction and Human Mobility

in the Late Quaternary

S - Supraregional Systems

Supraregional Systems - the climatic, environmental and socio-cultural frame of human population dynamics

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Information

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Due to the general development of the CRC, our principal investment in fieldwork will decrease and the efforts will be increased to enhance data management, data compilation, statistical data analysis, pattern recognition, multi-disciplinary production of maps, as well as establishment of models and narratives. Consequently, with importance of the mentioned tasks growing, we will slightly extend the number and size of projects concerning supra-regional and systemic approaches (former clusters E and partially F).

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We propose a catena of system-oriented projects connecting all relevant factors and scales mediating nature, culture and cognition. As a basic platform, the relation between climate and vegetation cover will be addressed (E6) with a special focus on fire impact (E7), followed by a new project E8 contributing faunal data and targeting hunter-prey relations between humans and ungulates, thus bridging the systemic gap between vegetation cover (E6) and humans (E3 and E1). The societal perspective (E3) on hunter-gatherer populations has already delivered distinct models of adaptation modes, which are essential in understanding criteria of human mobility (how push-and-pull factors are managed in a given socio-cultural system) and human demography. Over the last 8 years, we have felt a growing demand to include “soft factors” such as human agency, cognitive filters, self-adaption and particularly the role of interactive relationship between humans and their objects (e.g. expressed in the “extended mind” theory, which influences how “natural” factors are recognised and managed by humans). We will now comply with this demand through the newly established E9 project that concentrate on cognitive aspects of humans and their society in relation to the embedded “natural world”. Equivocally, the E9 project will - mainly by particular workshops to be held - negotiate between the scientific world (geosciences) and the hermeneutic world (cultural studies) interfering under the umbrella of the CRC. As the final chain link, the E1 project will continue to deliver demographic mapping and modelling, thus directly approaching one overall target of the CRC: the reconstruction of prehistoric population movement, linked to environmental factors. A recent E1 publication has now successfully achieved the first example of such comprehensive model and is thus available as a blueprint for further application (Central European LGM human occupation linked to environmental preferences: Maier et al., Quat. Int. 2016).
The catena of system-oriented projects will be relatively larger in the next CRC phase with 6 projects altogether and, consequently, will have approximately the same size as the “R“ group of projects (7 projects). Such enhancement of the system-oriented research community in the CRC mirrors the expressed intention of all participating PIs to better exploit the volume of information gathered in the CRC and to come along with explanations and narratives that encounter all major events of population dispersal and retreat from the Late Pleistocene to the Middle Holocene.