Conference aims

With 8 billion people worldwide and mounting tangible evidence of our impacts on the environment, our future is one of reckoning with our abilities to adapt, change, and thrive. Environmental archaeology, addressing the complex two-way relationship between our ancestors and their environments, offers a unique opportunity to inform on the resilience and adaptability of past societies to new and changing ecosystems, providing important insights into the factors that have shaped our relationship with the environment today.

Periods in prehistory where we see consequential transitions, such as the adaptations of hunter-gatherers to new landscapes in their move across continents, transitions from foraging to farming, and the emergence of the earliest settled villages, provide insights into the complexities of past human behaviour through multi-proxy and detailed applications in environmental archaeology.

In this international conference of the Association for Environmental Archaeology to be co-hosted by the University of Algarve, Interdisciplinary Center for Archaeology and the Evolution of Human Behaviour (ICArEHB), and the Spanish National Research Council, Institución Milá y Fontanals (IMF-CSIC), we are looking for contributions tracing momentous shifts in prehistory which provide evidence and insights into the palaeoenvironments, resource and landscape use strategies, and the ecological practices of prehistoric peoples, highlighting the diversity, resilience and adaptability of human populations in prehistory.

Potential sessions:

–              Palaeolithic environments, subsistence, and diet

–              Agricultural origins and the earliest villages

–              Adaptations to coastal and wetland environments

–              Environmental impact of sustained human settlements

–              Human adaptations to extreme or arid environments

–              Cross-disciplinary research in environmental archaeology