Subsistence economy and land use during the Late Bronze Age, Iron Age and the Roman period (1600 BC – 400 AD) in southeastern Bulgaria: bioarchaeological perspectives (original) (raw)
Southeast Thrace can be seen as a key region, constituting the contact zone between Thrace, the Near East and the Aegean world. From the Late Bronze Age to the Roman period (1600 BC – AD 400), this region corresponding to present-day southeastern Bulgaria, witnessed major social and economic changes, including population growth, the integration of societies in the networks of larger political groupings, the intensification of production and the establishment of a market economy, the beginnings of urbanization. This resulted in a dramatic increase in human pressure on the environment with the first record of large scale anthropogenic activities in the palaeo-ecological archives. In order to reconstruct ancient Thracian subsistence strategies and human impact on the environment related with those processes, as well as to integrate this information with other archaeological evidence and historical sources, a collaborative project between the KU Leuven, the RBINS (Belgium) and the BAS (Bulgaria) was initiated in 2015. The methodological approach is based on the combined contribution from archaeozoology, archaeobotany, stable isotope biogeochemistry, geoarchaeology and GIS modelling. The workshop will offer the opportunity to present and discuss the preliminary results of this ongoing study.
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Archaeobotanical analysis of the Neolithic site Bâlgarčevo, Southwestern Bulgaria
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