The subject of this research project is the study of plant remains in connection with the Iron Age settlement of Gran Carro, near Bolsena, one of the most important submerged archaeological sites known to date in Italy. For this reason, this project will be carried out by a multidisciplinary team of palaeobotanists, palynologists, and archaeologists. A more general objective is to reconstruct the vegetational dynamics in central Italy during the first millennium BC, with a particular focus on human impact on the landscape, as well as on the Late Holocene climate changes. In particular, the project aims to identify the plants were most used by man in central Italy during the Iron Age, the extent of vegetation change in relation to anthropogenic activity, and the effects of climate changes on the vegetation landscape and human societies at the transition between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, a time period known to have been affected by rapid changes in atmospheric circulation. Reconstructing the influence of human activity and climate on the environment throughout millennia is a fundamental for a better evaluation of ecosystems responses to the ongoing and predicted climate change.
The project PARABOLA explores different facets of palaeoenvironmental reconstruction and has the potential to significantly enhance knowledge on specific challenges, as follows.
1) the site selected for the project is a site of international archaeological importance, one of the best examples of an early Iron Age perilacustrine village in the central Mediterranean. The execution of palaeobotanical analyses in support of the archaeological reconstructions will greatly enrich the palaeoenvironmental knowledge of the site.
2) The analyses will be carried out with a high temporal resolution, possibly on a ten-year scale, which represents a level of detail not yet reached in the vegetational reconstructions of central Italy and which has the potential to significantly advance knowledge, particularly in terms of recognizing short-term climate change.
3) The new analyses of this project, supplemented by the palaeobotanical and archaeological knowledge already published for the central Mediterranean, will contribute to developing new hypotheses on: i) models of diffusion and development of agricultural and forestry practices in the region under study, in relation to demographic dynamics and climate change; ii) strategies developed by Iron Age populations to adapt their economy to the effects of environmental and climate change.
4) Lake Bolsena has the potential to be very sensitive to even minimal hydroclimatic fluctuations, thanks to extensive underwater terraces, which record changes in water level and have been occupied and exploited by the human populations that have followed one another in the area. This type of research, still little explored, is of great interest in the international context of climate studies. The pollen analyses on Lake Bolsena will provide a significant advance in the study of the effects of solar activity (Homeric Minimum) on the hydrological cycle and lake level oscillations and will contribute to the study of the vulnerability and resilience of Italian vegetation to the ongoing climate changes, since they pertain to a time period of rapid climate change in relation to changes in the solar magnetic field and in the North Atlantic atmospheric circulation.