SUSTAIN
Sustainability of Agriculture in Neolithic Europe
about sustain
SUSTAIN is a five-year research project (2020-2025) funded by the European Research Council
It seeks to understand sustainability in early Neolithic agricultural societies in Europe through a combination of climate and biodiversity informatics, bioarchaeology and agent-based modelling. It examines societies that have only recently settled in new environments and begun to practice mixed agro- pastoral husbandry. This at the time novel way of interaction with the environment involved a different scale of interference with the life cycles of plants and animals, and was of fundamental importance for subsequent developments in Europe.
The Team
SUSTAIN is a collaboration of archaeologists, palaeoclimatologists, biogeographers, experts in archaeological biogeochemistry and modellers.
The Aims
The aim of SUSTAIN is to elucidate how early agricultural societies in Europe maintained their capacity to self-generate and persist through time.
The Solutions
SUSTAIN addresses the question of sustainability in past societies using methodologies from archaeology, biogeography and complexity science.
SUSTAIN is an international collaboration
The research is conducted at the four partner institutions (University of Mainz, University of Bristol, UCL and Senckenberg Institute) and at the laboratories of the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle (MNHN) and the State Office of Cultural Heritage, Baden-Württemberg
