Innovating Works

SUSTAIN

Financiado
Sustainability of Agriculture in Neolithic Europe
The aim of SUSTAIN is to elucidate how early agricultural societies in Europe maintained their capacity to self-generate and persist through time. It examines societies that have only recently settled in new environments and begun... The aim of SUSTAIN is to elucidate how early agricultural societies in Europe maintained their capacity to self-generate and persist through time. It examines societies that have only recently settled in new environments and begun to practice mixed agro-pastoral husbandry. This at the time novel way of interaction with the environment involved a different scale of interference with the life cycles of plants and animals, and was of fundamental importance for subsequent developments in Europe. While archaeological research traditionally centres on the question of how societies and livelihoods changed, the project asks what made them capable to carry on, i.e. to remain sustainable. The project weaves together approaches from social anthropology, biogeography, bioarchaeology and complexity science in a manner that has not been attempted previously. We will examine the relationship of domesticates’ past range expansions and climate using correlative species distribution models (SDMs) and will derive past agropastoral practices from isotope signals in plant and animal remains. Novel approaches of quantitative inference will allow us to estimate parameters of crop and livestock productivity and to directly compare agropastoral performance across time and space in Europe. Using this knowledge, we will employ spatially explicit agent-based simulation to explore the social parameters of growth and decline of the first agricultural societies in Europe in previously unconsidered detail. We will examine the role of social webs of lateral insurance in colonising populations, and the extent to which fragmentation of these relationships constrained population expansion into new regions. The project will produce insights that challenge conventional wisdom about farming and environmental sustainability, particularly in regard to social connectedness, relations of sharing, and mobility, which will have value and impact beyond archaeology. ver más
31/12/2026
2M€
Duración del proyecto: 78 meses Fecha Inicio: 2020-06-15
Fecha Fin: 2026-12-31

Línea de financiación: concedida

El organismo H2020 notifico la concesión del proyecto el día 2020-06-15
Línea de financiación objetivo El proyecto se financió a través de la siguiente ayuda:
Presupuesto El presupuesto total del proyecto asciende a 2M€
Líder del proyecto
JOHANNES GUTENBERGUNIVERSITAT MAINZ No se ha especificado una descripción o un objeto social para esta compañía.
Perfil tecnológico TRL 4-5