A05_06

Data before the deluge: Prospects and limitations of summarising large radiocarbon datasets to investigate climate- and environmental impact on hunter-gatherers

Hoebe P ¹,  Peeters H¹, Arnoldussen S¹

¹University Of Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands

Radiocarbon ‘dates as data’ approaches (Summed Probability Distributions - SPDs) have become common in archaeological studies as instruments to investigate the impact of external events on societies. Such studies use radiocarbon dates as a proxy for the intensity of past human activity. Research- and preservation bias are inherent issues in such studies that have to be contended with. Do density fluctuations relate to changes in human activity, or to the intersection of site accessibility, differences in organic preservation, and the process of archaeological research and policy?

We collected a large radiocarbon dataset of Late Palaeolithic and Mesolithic Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark, consisting of ca. 5500  radiocarbon dates. We investigated whether changes in the density of hunter-gatherer communities’ activity correlates with the timing of Late Glacial climate fluctuations, Early Holocene climate events (11.4, 10.3, 9.3 and 8.2ka events), and the drowning of ‘Doggerland’ (i.e. the North Sea).

Our SPD model tests (conducted with the R package rcarbon) show several significant density fluctuations that may be correlated to climate and environmental events, and others that may relate to sociocultural changes or to bias. To deal with bias, we conducted permutation tests on subsets of the dataset that are potentially affected by different formation processes. This exploration highlights the impact of sample material choice, which is constrained by geographically and temporally differentiated preservation conditions and influenced by policy. Future steps involve expanding the analysis in relation to landscape dynamics as well as closer analysis of the timing of cultural changes.