Society-environment links in the area of the sanctuary of Artemis Amarysia (Evia Island, Greece) based upon paleoenvironmental reconstruction

The catchment basin of the Sarandopotamos on Evia Island (Greece) has been an environment of habitation and worship since the early Neolithic. Many settlements from different periods have been found in this area. It is also in this catchment, close to the Sarandopotamos delta, that the Swiss School of Archaeology in Greece discovered in 2007, the sanctuary of Artemis Amarysia after centuries of investigation. This discovery aside, we still do not understand if, and the extent to which, the human history of occupation and abandonment in this region is related to its environmental history. Thus, the aim of this research is to use a suite of paleoenvironmental reconstruction methods to recreate ancient landscapes, their environments and their evolution to understand the society-environment relation. The sanctuary and its eventual abandonment could potentially be impacted by synergistic reactions between changes in sediment supply, changes in basin hydrology and sea-level all of which may have impacted both the magnitude and frequency of local flooding via changes in river bed level, lateral shifting of the river and water table rises and falls. Thus, the aim of this project is to undertake an integrated, multi-method reconstruction of the local water-sediment environment and to relate this to the history of the sanctuary and wider human settlement. This will then test whether an environmental influence needs to be retained as a hypothesis for wider societal changes in this area. In order to do this, a model of the sedimentary dynamics of the catchment is being carried out using LAPSUS software, and sedimentary cores are being obtained in order to understand the relationship between environmental and human-driven (e.g. land use) change in the catchment, the geomorphic response of the delta and the history of human occupation. The relationship between the delta and eustatic and isostatic history also has to be understood. A single beam eco sounder survey is been conducted in order to investigate the different delta created by the shift in the Sarandopotamos bed. Moreover, in order to better understand the local context and the landscapes observed today, this project is also interested in the geomorphological history of periods prior to human occupation. These different aspects emphasize the complexity of the project but through developing a multi-disciplinary and multi-scale appraisal of environmental history and how it links to human history we may get a better understanding of the extent to which the two are connected. This poster will present preliminary modelling results that demonstrate the sensitivity of the land-ocean interaction to sea-level rise and delta dynamics from the late Pleistocene through the Holocene to the present.