Energy regimes help tackle limitations with the prehistoric cultural-phases approach to learn about sustainable transitions: Archaeological evidence from northern Spain

• Published in: Journal of Quaternary Science
• Main Authors: Martinez, Alexandre, Kluiving, Sjoerd, Muñoz-Rojas, José, Borja Barrera, César, Fraile Jurado, Pablo, Roldán Muñoz, Esperanza, Mejías García, Juan Carlos
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Wiley 2023
• Subjects: Energy regimes; Quaternary Science; Landscape Approach; Iberian Peninsula; Muñoz; Rojas; Terranova
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10174/34939; https://doi.org/10.1002/jqs.3522

Human societies face challenges in transitioning towards low-carbon economies and sustainable management of land use and natural resources. Documenting and learning from past transitions helps policy-makers cope with such challenges. The agricultural revolution in Cantabrian Spain (ca. 7000 cal a bp) was one major adaptation of hunter-gatherers to a changing environment that started with the Last Glacial Maximum (ca. 24 000 cal a bp) and lasted until the Mid-Holocene (ca. 5300 cal a bp). Classic approaches to documenting prehistoric cultural timelines are based on manufacturing and technology, thus limited in their ability to describe the sustainability of past societies. Energy regimes, a functional societal approach independent from time, investigate and consider patterns of resource and energy use in various cohabiting and cooperating cultural phases. To examine past energy regimes, a database of archaeological remains was compiled to document four indicators: mobility, economy, overexploitation and societal complexity. Statistical analyses were conducted to elucidate trends, changes and continuity in subsistence strategies by hunter-gatherers and sedentary societies. Results show that energy regimes act as a complement to cultural phases, adding novel functional analyses of past societies to cultural stratigraphy units common in archaeology, shedding light on the sustainability of past societal transitions. The research presented in this paper has been undertaken within the project TERRANOVA: the European Landscape Learning Initiative, funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions–Innovative Training Networks MSCA-ITN, under grant agreement No 813904. Work by José Muñoz-Rojas was financed via National Research funds provided by FCT – National Foundation for Science and Technology, through the project UIDB/05183/2020. This research is included in TERRANOVA's Work Package 2 (WP2): Exploring past environments and energy regimes, focusing on the ...