ABSTRACT
The lessons that we can learn from human-environment-climate interactions in the past can significantly impact current policies in ecological justice and sustainability, supporting the correct understanding of the behaviour of natural ecosystems on different timescales, including past, present and future. This is particularly pertinent in the Mediterranean region, one of the most environmentally sensitive areas of Europe, where land degradation and diversification can have severe consequences for human and natural communities.
An increasing body of intersectoral research projects has developed and tested new methodologies to explore the varying nature of human responses to environmental, climatic and societal transformations in the last decade. These projects have opened up the potential of using Big(gish) Data in archaeological research, including radiocarbon, 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.
In this paper, I reassess the corpus of proxy data from Prehistoric 12000–2500 cal. BCE and Protohistoric Cyprus (2500–1100 cal. BCE), with particular emphasis on radiocarbon dates for modelling ancient population size. Despite the spatially and chronologically uneven distribution of archaeodemographic data, this information baseline can support a new and critically integrated understanding of the interaction between ancient communities and their surrounding landscapes.
