Project Division B. Movements

The project focuses on resources of late Neanderthals and early anatomically modern humans in Europe. It examines the continuities and discontinuities of human behaviour in a diachronic perspective at this crucial hinge in the history of mankind, using the example of material and immaterial resources, against the background of the immigration of Homo sapiens to Europe and the encounter with 'indigenous' Neanderthals. An important change at the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic is the presumably first emergence of figurative art and other innovations in the symbolic field, which the project is dealing with in the third phase of funding.

The project focuses on researching the development of resources in favourable and unfavourable natural environments from an archaeological and archaeopedological perspective. Central is the question of settlement and land use dynamics. With the interdisciplinary analysis of soils, in particular colluvia, and their archaeological context, settlement and land use dynamics and the associated potential movements of people (for example in the form of settlement relocations) are deciphered. The focus of the third phase of funding is a transition period from favour to disfavour in one and the same area (here: Hochdorf/Enz) in order to better understand the temporal dynamics of settlement and land use.

Castles and monasteries are being studied as resources for the formation of aristocratic rule during High and Late Middle Ages. During the first phase of funding, the focus was on the economic and spiritual resources of medieval monasteries and the nobility interacting with them in Upper Swabia; during the second phase, it was on castles and the formation of lower nobility between the Rems, Fils and Danube rivers. In the third phase, the interaction of castle and monastery is systematically and comparatively examined in order to work out socio-cultural, spatial and temporal similarities, differences and changes in the ResourceAssemblages and ResourceCultures linked to them.

Resources have often played an important role in considerations of the causes of migration in antiquity: above all, material resources such as land, grain or metals. The project aims to break down this concept of resources defined according to economic aspects and to focus on the aspect of cultural attribution of value. Comparative studies of two geographical areas with different conditions should help to replace an outdated understanding of resources with a more differentiated view.

The project investigates socio-cultural dynamics triggered by the Phoenician expansion from the Levant coast into the central and western Mediterranean in the 1^st mill. BC. The development of raw material deposits in the west led to the establishment of numerous Phoenician settlements of varying size, quality and longevity. Distinct, locally differentiated complexes developed around mineral and agricultural resources that were interconnected in a pan-Mediterranean maritime network with high connectivity.

This project investigates how people acquired, used and valued food and health as resources. Anthropological and bioarchaeological analyses of skeletal finds allow to look at maritime and non-maritime societies in prehistory and the early Middle Ages, because the use of food resources left specific traces in their bones. In addition, the influence of migration patterns and the adaptation of the societies under consideration on these food- and health-specific resource cultures is investigated.

The project investigates the main resources of the northern peripheral or neighbouring regions of Mesopotamia in a diachronic approach. For the third phase of funding of SFB 1070, the relations between the resources are to be modelled and visually represented through a series of spatial analyses. To this end, various methodological tools will be used in succession and building on each other: water modelling, soil modelling, path modelling, settlement modelling, landscape modelling and finally the modelling of ResourceCultures.