Vishal Kataria 

Current Research

Environmental reconstruction of the Carmel coast during the Neolithic  

The history of coastal towns on the Mediterranean Sea shores is well known. An increase in sea levels during the last Ice Age, combined with shifting climatic circumstances, had a huge impact on nearby Neolithic villages. The purpose of this study is to Investigate the environmental circumstances prior to, during, and following the establishment of Neolithic coastal communities in the Eastern Mediterranean. The findings of this study will provide important new insights into how Neolithic populations had to adjust culturally to their environmental shifting circumstances.

WAs part of the project, sediment cores will be retrieved from well-known Neolithic communities, which are currently submerged off-northern Israel. In order to more fully reconstruct the environmental settings and how these responded to changing climate conditions, sediment cores will be recovered not only from the drowned towns but also from the surrounding natural environment. The sediment cores will be analyzed, and a set of criteria will be used, including as physical, chemical, and biological proxies, to provide a complete set of instruments that will allow a thorough interpretation of the submerged landscape. For example, using Si/Ca as a metric for dust, X-Ray Fluorescence analysis will produce results on the elemental geochemistry record that may be interpreted to understand historical hydrological and climate variability. In addition, doing PAHs analysis on bulk sediment samples provide important data on the frequency and size of natural (or man-made) fire occurrences. Other organic proxies (i.e. Total Organic Carbon content, or TOC) are important proxies for interpreting the environmental conditions.

In brief, the methodologies used will offer a high-resolution diachronic model of how extremely localized environmental dynamics are intimately related to archaeological evidence of adaptive responses. The study will look at how the environment has changed over time and how this has affected coastal Neolithic communities, which were compelled to develop new technologies and adjust to the shifting environment. The project will shed light on an important and as-yet-unread chapter of a world now submerged beneath the sea, revising the early history of the Eastern Mediterranean coast as the launching pad for innovation, adaptation, and connectivity that prepared the ground for the emergence of later Mediterranean complex societies.