"CHANGES” – Cultural Heritage and Archaeology for the study and dissemination of Natural, Geological, Environmental and Social events due to climate changes in antiquity: learning from the past for a better awareness in the future

In the last decades, many policy-makers and scientists have been arguing that the current bout of human-induced climate change will pose major challenges for humans all over the globe. Issues such as global heating, the rising of the sea level and the modification of global atmospheric circulation will lead to increasingly severe weather in many areas, resulting in food shortages, mass migration and increased conflict. The debate is particularly vigorous at a global level, but the question is even more serious on a European and Mediterranean scale[1]. The Mediterranean region is in fact characterized by extreme diversity in space and time of both human and environmental communities, with a composite biogeographic origin of its flora and fauna[2]. The history of human-induced changes in biota and ecosystems entails a long-term ecological trajectory of natural communities, resulting in a mosaic of cultural landscapes and in a complex distribution of species. Even if the first signs of human impact on the landscape date back to 50,000 BP, the domestication of plants and animal at around 10,000 BP represents the crucial moment of the Holocene period, producing the turnover and superimposition of a series of land-use practices on landscapes, evidence of which is still visible today.

The purpose of CHANGE is to create a new infrastructure for networking a large group of research institutions engaged with the understanding of global changes in the Mediterranean region. It aims at defining scientific protocols for exploring past changes in economic, social, cultural and ecological patterns in the region through the use of science-based techniques for producing climate proxies, environmental proxies and archaeodemographic proxies. Additionally, CHANGES aims at exploring innovative ways for coping with the general difficulty in exploring the relationship between climate change and societal change because of a substantial mismatch between qualitative methods used for studying culture and quantitative methods used for studying climate and environmental change[3].

In the last decade, an increasing number of intersectoral research projects was commenced for understanding past climate and environmental change and associated human responses have opened up the potential of using Big Data in archaeological research into climate impacts[4]. These projects include landcover, satellite, botanical, zoological and genetic datasets and general (climate) circulation models (GCMs) that can be mapped onto each other in order to examine long-term, large-scale trends in different datasets calibrated against each other. Our opinion is that the research avenues opened up by these projects is extraordinary, despite they still miss one of the main problems: how can we map cultural change and then correlate it with other possible forms and sources of change? CHANGES is aimed at exploring these main questions, in particular focusing on the different needs related to research, dissemination, training and standardising.

The choice of both the partners and the associated partners is specifically based on the perfect match and integration of their protocols, methodologies, field of interest and areas of expertise, which cover a broader range of research phases, from data collection to data analysis and dissemination. Several of the partnerships are widely tested as the results of previous collaborative research projects in European and extra-European countries (i.e. Italy, France, Albania, Poland, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Egypt, Libya, Montenegro, etc).

The multi-disciplinary nature of the proposed network is indicated by the presence of globally recognised research centers, public institutions bodies media agencies and private companies. This complex set of involved institutions guarantees both high-level research and practical professionalization.