Holocene Rapid Climate Changes and Social Responses in Marginal Environments: Cross-disciplinary Evidence from the Acacus Mts. (Libyan Sahara)
by
Savino di Lernia
Dipartimento di Scienze Storiche, Archeologiche e Antropologiche dell'Antichità. Università di Roma `La Sapienza', Via Palestro 63, 00195, Rome, Italy

A recent interest of archaeological investigation lies in the analysis of cultural trajectories, particularly in relation to the interface between environmental variations and social responses. However, this kind of approach has to combine different and unequal proxies: climate, landscape, people, and time.

Archaeological research in the Acacus Mts., south-western Libya, in the core of the Saharan desert, allowed us to gather in the last decade a fair quantity of data from Holocene sites: settlements, rock art contexts, burials. A cross-disciplinary view of cultural adjustments matched against environmental patterns allows for a different perception of social responses to rapid climatic changes during the Holocene. Archaeology, genetics, rock art, archaeobotany, and geoarchaology set the agenda on land use, mobility and social identity as major issues for the explanation of prehistoric pastoral society.

The evidence from the Libyan Sahara shows how archaeology can build its explanations on an extraordinary data set, and can use as a supporting documentation a long-term scale archive to analyze the relations between natural dramatic events (such as aridity and desertification) and social dynamics.

Date received: July 28, 2005

Copyright © 2005 by the author(s). The author(s) of this document and the organizers of the conference have granted their consent to include this abstract in Atlas Conferences Inc. Document # caqy-70.