Mediterranean Resilience - Collapse and Adaptation in Antique Maritime Societies - Assaf Yasur-Landau
Anthropogenic Erosion from Hellenistic to Recent Times in the Northern Gulf of Corinth, Greece
Mediterranean Resilience - Collapse and Adaptation in Antique Maritime Societies - Assaf Yasur-Landau
Katrina Cantu [+]
University of California, San Diego (PhD candidate)
Katrina Cantu is a Ph.D. student at UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography.Her primary research interest is how environments change over time, and how these changes as well as humanenvironment interaction can be studied through the collection and analysis of sediment cores. Her methods include identification of microfaunal and macrobotanical remains, sedimentological analysis, isotope analysis, XRF core-scanning, and stratigraphy. Katrina's field work has taken her to Israel's Carmel Coast and Puerto Rico to collect sediment cores and assist in both terrestrial and underwater excavations. She works with Scripps Center for Marine Archaeology researchers Profs. Tom Levy, Dick Norris, and Isabel Rivera-Collazo and has a BS and MS in Earth Sciences, both completed at Scripps Institution of
Oceanography.
Richard Norris [+]
University of California, San Diego
Richard Norris is Distinguished Professor of Paleobiology at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego. He has a long oceanographic research career working on micropaleontology of the open oceans, warm climate dynamics, and human impacts on marine ecosystems. His research is built around Scientific Ocean Drilling where he has led two expeditions, sailed on four others,
has been an author of numerous drilling proposals, and has served on the scientific panels and program offices that direct this international effort. He has also led oceanographic cruises to the North Atlantic, Mediterranean and NE Pacific in addition to land-based field studies in Greece, Israel, Sicily, the Alps, South Africa New Zealand, Australia and western North America. He is the Curator of the SIO Geological
Collections and has worked to set up the Scripps Center for Marine Archaeology, to link archaeological records to environmental history. His training includes a BS from UC Santa Cruz, a MS from the University of Arizona, a Ph.D. from Harvard University and experience as a postdoc and research scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Norris is author of 143 research papers and 7 books.
George Papatheodorou [+]
University of Patras
George Papatheodorou is Professor of “Environmental and Geological Oceanography” in the Geology Department and Dean of School of Natural Sciences of the University of Patras. He is/was coordinator of many national, international and EU-funded research projects. He has carried out marine geoarchaeological surveys in Alexandria of Egypt, in Croatia, Cyprus, Corsica, Italy and in Lebanon. He has also conducted marine surveys in many archaeological sites of Greece (Cape Sounio, Poros and Dokos Islands, ancient harbours of Zea, Mounichia and Kyllene, Naval Battles of Navarino and Lepanto, ancient shipwrecks in Ionian and Aegean Seas). He has more than one hundred (100) publications in International Refereed Journals with more than 3000 citations.
Ioannis Liritzis [+]
Henan University, China
View Website
Ioannis Liritzis is Distinguished Professor of Archaeometry-Natural Sciences-Archaeo-environment at Henan University, China and serves as Dean of Class IV (Natural Sciences) at the European Academy of Sciences and Arts (Salzburg) since 2020. He specializes in Natural Sciences in archaeology, cultural heritage, and geo-environment, though he has researched a range of multidisciplinary fields during his career. Liritzis was
included in the 2021 Stanford list of top 2% ranked scientists in the world. The founder of two international journals (in Scopus and WoS) and member of editorial boards of over 30 Scopus indexed journals, he has also published more than 300 papers and books (www.liritzis.eu).
Dafna Langgut [+]
Tel Aviv University
Dafna Langgut is Head of the Laboratory of Archaeobotany and Ancient Environments and Senior Lecturer at the Department of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University, Israel. Langgut specializes in the study of past vegetation and climate based on the identification of botanical remains (pollen and wood-charcoal remains). Through this discipline, she considers the past relationship between humans and the environment—for example, human dispersal out of Africa and the beginning of agriculture. Langgut’s research also involves the identification of plant remains from archaeological contexts. Her studies address issues such as fruit-tree cultivation, diet, plant usage, plant migration, and ancient gardens.
Maria Geraga [+]
University of Patras
Maria Geraga is Professor of Archaeological Oceanography at the Geology Department of the University of Patras, Greece. Her research focuses on paleoceanography, paleoclimatology, and mapping of underwater cultural and natural heritage sites. Geraga has conducted paleoceanographic studies in marine sediments of shallow and deep waters from the Aegean, Ionian, Levantine, and Red Seas and adjacent gulfs. She has
participated in underwater geo-archaeological projects in Greece, Cyprus, Egypt, Croatia, Italy, Corsica and Lebanon. She has published more than 60 peer review scientific articles and many chapters in books.
Thomas E Levy [+]
University of California, San Diego
Thomas E. Levy is Distinguished Professor of the Graduate Division, Co-Director of the Center for Cyber-Archaeology and Sustainability at the Qualcomm Institute and inaugural holder of the Norma Kershaw Chair in the Archaeology of Ancient Israel and Neighboring Lands at the University of California, San Diego. With over thirty years of archaeological field experience in Israel and Jordan, Levy’s current research focuses on the Iron Age historical archaeology of Edom in southern Jordan. He is Associate Director of the Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology (CISA3) at UCSD's California Insitute of Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). Levy is editor of Archaeology, Anthropology and Cult: The Sanctuary at Gilat, Israel (Equinox Publishing, 2006) and co-editor, with Thomas Higham, of The Bible and Radiocarbon Dating: Archaeology, Text and Science (Equinox Publishing, 2005). His most recent book, with his wife Alina and the Sthapathy brothers of Swamimalai is Masters of Fire: Hereditary Bronze Casters of South India (German Mining Museum, 2008). Levy is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Description
The problem of soil erosion due to human activities such as deforestation, pastoralism, and agriculture has long been recognized. Greece, like much of the of the Mediterranean world, is particularly susceptible to soil loss, due to the arid climate and steep, rocky terrain, and previous studies have sought to date this soil aggradation and to attribute it to human activity, climatic changes, or a combination of the two. This study uses near-shore sediment cores from Antikyra Bay, in the Gulf of Corinth, to understand the sources and timing of erosional events in the study area of the Kastrouli-Antikyra Bay Land and Sea Project. Sedimentological analysis and radiocarbon dating of foraminifera and twigs show that there are two major periods of soil aggradation in this record: the first occurred in the Hellenistic and/or Roman period (ca. 1900–2100 BP), and the second started in the Ottoman period (ca. 350 BP) and persists today. In addition to documentation of soil aggradation, two paleo-shorelines were identified during the geophysical survey. A local relative sea level curve constructed for this study suggests the shallower of the two is between ~7.7 and 8.7 thousand years old, while the deeper feature formed around 8.9 to 9.7 thousand years ago.