Bosch, Marjolein
ERC Starting Grant for the COPE research project
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About the project
In her ERC Starting Grant “COPE: The role of climate change on past human living conditions: Resource acquisition strategies and landscape use in eastern Central Europe from the Gravettian Golden Age to the Last Glacial Maximum” Marjolein D. Bosch investigates the challenges faced by Ice Age hunter-gatherer groups and how they coped with extreme climate change.
The start of the coldest phase of the last Ice Age around roughly 30,000–25,000 years ago was marked by extreme climate fluctuations in Europe. This triggered massive relocation of both human and animal communities to more favourable places. However, some hunter-gatherer groups stayed and adapted their behaviour to the harsh living conditions. The team around Bosch explores how the people who stayed exploited local habitats with a focus on perishable resources. Bosch uses the site complex of Grub-Kranawetberg (Austria) and its exceptionally well-preserved organic remains as a field laboratory.
COPE will create a new conceptual framework for analysing the way humans lived and used their surrounding landscape in the past, which can also be applied to sites where no organic remains have been preserved. In this way, the project will change our understanding of human resilience in the past.