Abstract
While archaeology researches the past, it is often applied to current events, such as land rights and ownership disputes, reviving and preserving cultural traditions, and establishing a framework for current social issues. Climate change is by no means a new phenomenon, but the current human-accelerated climate change has moved discussions of sustainability to the forefront. Balancing Nature and Culture in Southeast European Landscape Evolutions and Integrated Legacies looks to the past to inform the future. My research project studies long-term human settlement patterns in southern Romania, with a special focus on the Romanian Carpathians and the Danube Delta. These areas are particularly sensitive to environmental changes and have seen a decrease in biodiversity, which researchers are attempting to counter through conservation and rewilding initiatives. The archaeological perspective that this project provides is essential to understanding how landscapes have developed over time, how past peoples used the landscape and the resources it provided, and how past people dealt with changes in the climate and environment. This project has three goals: 1. Study human settlement patterns from the Paleolithic into the Middle Ages 2. Understand the role of fluvial systems as pathways (or waterways) between different landscapes types and ecosystems 3. Identify the drivers of human-environment interactions and evaluating if past land management systems can be used in the present as more sustainable practices. These goals are considered within a wider context of creating a sustainable future and sustainable archaeology.
Details
Presentation Type
Theme
Economic, Social, and Cultural Context
KEYWORDS
Archaeology, Land-use history, GIS, Romanian Carpathians, Danube Delta
