Join the VUB MARI team (Multidisciplinary Archaeological Research Institute) and the division of Geography and Tourism of KU Leuven for the FWO-funded Junior Research project ‘Terraces as a land management strategy in the Eastern Mediterranean: a long-term perspective’ which aims to better understand the role of terraces for historical agriculture. Within this framework we are opening a call for a 4 year fully-funded doctoral position in Landscape and Geoarchaeology (micromorphology). Terraces form an integral element of the Mediterranean landscape. Despite their widespread occurrence, the history of terraces has remained poorly understood due to problems with accurately dating their construction and modification over time and determining past cultivation practices for which they were used. This has hampered broader research on the histories of terraced landscapes, examining when and why rural communities developed them and how their long-term investment choices have shaped these landscapes. This project presents an innovative study of terraces in Anatolia and Cyprus to investigate to what extent they constituted a sustainable and resilient land management strategy for past Eastern Mediterranean communities. It relies on a pioneering combination of prospection and dating techniques, as well as geoarchaeological and archaeobotanical research, and geomorphological and agronomical modelling methods, to revolutionize our understanding of past terrace systems. Although applied to specific parts of the Eastern Mediterranean, the approach and methods are intended to be generic in application. Furthermore, the millennia-long histories of terraces have exceptional potential to illuminate long-term land management strategies in relation to environmental and/or socio-economic changes. Therefore, this project will not only generate knowledge on human-environment interactions within past agricultural communities, but have relevance for informing sustainable strategies for the future as well. Within the Terraces project, the PhD candidate is expected to assist in creating a terrace typology for the study areas and to add chronological detail to this by using optically stimulated luminescence (OSL), both preliminary OSL-profiling in the field using portable OSL equipment as well as OSL dating in the lab using standard protocols. By implementing soil and sediment micromorphology, geochemical analysis and, if possible, the study of phytoliths, the PhD candidate will also explore terrace use and management over time. These results will then be evaluated against (un)published historical, archaeological, environmental, and climatic data, to consider terracing as a response to changing environmental and/or socio-economic conditions in both case study areas individually and comparatively within the wider Eastern Mediterranean. By doing so the project hopes to gain insight into the organization and decision-making related to the construction, maintenance, use and abandonment of terracing systems.
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[Website Vrije Universiteit Brussel]