Investigating Human-Environmental Interactions in the Zagros Region (Southwest Asia) during the Late Glacial and Holocene Period
Awardee: Maria Rabbani
Year: 2020
The aim of this research is to reconstruct the environmental history of the Zagros region during the Late Glacial and Holocene period (last 14,700 years). In each study region, sediment core sequences from lakes and mires have been sampled for high-resolution multi-proxy palaeoenvironmental analysis, including pollen, macroscopic and microscopic charcoal, non-pollen palynomorphs, organic matter, magnetic susceptibility and geochemical analyses (ITRAX). Obtaining funding for radiocarbon dates permitted the addressal of the aims and objectives for the project, and assisted in the determination of future laboratory analyses.
This four-year research project is being carried out in collaboration with the ‘Central Zagros Archaeological Project’ (CZAP) [a joint UK-Iran-Iraq research project], and an international project funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) involving teams from the Universities of Sulaymaniyah (Iraq), Heidelberg (Germany) and Munich (Germany) and the directorate of Antiquities in Sulaymaniyah under the leadership of Dr Simone Muehl and Prof Manfred Roesch.
The objectives of this research are: (1) to evaluate the impact of human activities on the landscape and environment, especially periods of cultivation and/or animal husbandry through integration of palaeoenvironmental and archaeological records. This will enable us to improve understanding of the role farming communities had in driving patterns of vegetation and broader environmental change; (2) to assess the impact of climate change on vegetation succession and the agricultural system, and the resilience of human communities and ecosystems to climate change e.g. Oak (Quercus) woodland expansion in the region.
Two sites have been selected for palaeoenvironmental research: Hashilan Wetland, located at the foothill of Khorin Mountain at an elevation of 1310 m above sea level, 35 km northwest of Kermanshah Province in the Zagros Mountains of western Iran (Fig. 1); Lake Ganau, which is located in the Ranya Plain (Iraq), 131 km northwest of Sulaimaniyah city (Fig. 1). The reasons for choosing these sites were: their close proximity to archaeological sites including Bestansur (Iraq) and Sheikh-e Abad (Iran); the known long temporal records from both sites, and the good preservation of microfossils suitable for palaeoenvironmental reconstruction.
Archaeological and Environmental Background
Unlike other regions of Southwest Asia, the central Zagros area and hilly flanks of western Iran and eastern Iraq have received little attention since the 1970s, creating gaps in our understanding of the human history of the region (Matthews et al. 2013). In addition, there is a scarcity of high-resolution palaeoenvironmental records. Such records are needed to: (1) address uncertainty regarding the timing and regional significance of environmental change and climatic transitions, such the Late Glacial Interstadial, Late Glacial Stadial (‘Younger Dryas chronozone’), onset of the Holocene, and 11.4, 9.3, 8.2, 5.9 and 4.2 ka cal BP events, which have been identified in the Greenland ice cores, as well as marine and terrestrial records (Moreno et al. 2014), and (2) evaluate the potential influence of environmental and climate change on human societies (Sharifi et al. 2015). One limiting factor for palaeoenvironmental studies in Southwest Asia is the paucity of lakes that extend back to the Late-Glacial period (Djamali et al. 2008). The available pollen records include: Lake Zeribar (van Zeist and Bottema 1997), Lake Mirabad (van Zeist and Bottema, 1977), Lake Urmia (Bottema, 1986), and Lake Van (Litt et al. 2014). However, some of these records suffer from dating problems, such as hard water effect and low numbers of radiocarbon dates, as well as being low-resolution studies. In order to make more specific correlations between palaeoenvironmental, palaeoclimatic and archaeological data, both the temporal resolution and spatial scale of the datasets need to be of improved (Walsh et al. 2017:403).
Conclusion
Funding from the Iran society allowed me to place my high-resolution palaeoenvironmental records within a robust geochronological framework. This also enabled precise temporal correlation of the records with: (1) known archaeological and palaeoenvironmental records from the Zagros region (e.g. Lake Zeribar); (2) palaeoclimatic records from speleothem and lake sequences in Iran and Iraq (e.g. Roberts and Wright 1993). The dating programme not only chronologically constrained the palaeoenvironmental events recorded as the analyses progress, but also allowed better understanding on the onset and termination of climatic events and possible regional variations in their timing.
About the awardee
Maria Rabbani is PhD candidate at the University of Reading in the Department of Archaeology where she works on a dissertation titled Investigating human-environmental interactions in the Zagros region during the Late Glacial and Holocene period.