The HORIZON Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action (MSCA) Doctoral Network “Archaeological Coastal Heritage: Past, present and future of a hidden prehistoric legacy” (ArCHe) trains 10 doctoral candidates in studying Stone Age hunter-fisher-gatherer remains in coastal areas across Europe in an international, interdisciplinary and intersectoral perspective.
DC7: Prehistoric shell-middens as residues of gathering and living at the coast are a clue to understand the way of life of Holocene living near the coast. They can give us an access to hunter-fisher-gatherer (HFG) activities, their diet, their residence mode, the organization of their settlement, and of their territory all around their living place or places. Our knowledge on shell-middens in different regional settings along the East Atlantic facade is varied, because of both their diversity in original composition and the different involvement of archaeologists through time. The objective of DC7 is to compile all the archaeological data from artefacts to bioarchaeological data on prehistoric shell-middens for a novel interdisciplinary, cross-regional summary and scientific evaluation including geomatic statistics, and to establish a citizen tool accessible to researchers to compare shell-middens from different areas. Such a database is necessary to overcome the frontiers between countries and to collect and compare the diversity of archaeological remains (spatial data of the sites, archaeozoology, lithic technology). A first version of this database is already existing, but it is necessary to update it. DC7 will seek methods to cross-reference archaeobiological and archaeological data. This data will be geo-referenced, which will allow to draw up the spatial distribution of e.g. artefact types or bioarchaeological data. This project will use geomatics statistics, where statistic tests will allow to differentiate what is common to most of these residue heaps and what is particular. Are their particularities linked to economic or social factors? The process of neolithization e.g., with the change from HFG to agrarian societies, is diverse and complex, and this database will be a clue to describe the diversity of this phenomenon in coastal areas. It will also give researchers the opportunity to identify poorly documented misconceptions such as e.g. the residence of certain Neolithic populations admitted as permanent, which is not necessarily correct.
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[Website ArCHe project]