Soil and Human Archives of early food Resilience and Environmental modification

The proposal addresses the critical need to understand past food systems in the face of climate change-driven food insecurity by exploring the transition from foraging to farming in Southern Scandinavia. Challenging the 'Neolithic Revolution' paradigm as a sudden shift to a farming diet occurring in the Neolithic, the project investigates whether Mesolithic Ertebølle societies (7,400–5,900 BP) intentionally managed pit deposits as anthropogenic soils for plant-use and landscape management before the spread of agriculture. Archaeological records indicate that these foragers created surplus-producing, semi-sedentary communities with a diet more reliant on terrestrial plants than previously thought. These settlements feature numerous anthropogenic pit deposits, rich in organic waste, which are traditionally interpreted as middens.Using cutting-edge micro-analytical archaeology and luminescence dating, SHARE (Soil and Human Archives of early food Resilience and Environmental modification) will analyse midden composition and linked wetland sediments to uncover human-induced soil modifications and plant-management strategies across the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition. This interdisciplinary approach, integrating microstructural, chemical, and molecular evidence from directly dated archaeological soils, aims to reveal contextual and in situ evidence of landscape modification and subsistence strategies amid the forage-to-farming transition and their long-term environmental impacts. Through planned secondments at world-class institutes of geoscience and molecular archaeology, the fellow will gain advanced technical skills and expand collaborative networks, positioning him as a leader in reconstructing past human-environment dynamics. SHARE seeks to challenge canonical assumptions about human-plant interactions and the emergence of food production in human prehistory, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration between archaeology and geoscience.