Modelling Interactions between Climate Change and Agriculture in the Ancient West – MICA

The multidisciplinary MICA project aims to assess the impact of climatic variations on crop productivity (wheat, barley, millet, grapevine, olive) and their influence, in interaction with social factors, on the transformation of agrarian economies and agrobiodiversity. MICA focuses on four areas of interest in Western Europe and the Mediterranean, over a multi-millennial period between the Bronze Age and the end of Roman times (2000 B.C. - 600 A.D.), which underwent major agricultural changes, some of which associated with key economic developments (onset of olive growing, viticulture, cereal trade, etc.). The complexity of the questions that underlie this project requires the implementation of innovative research which integrates various disciplinary fields: archaeobotany, paleogenomics, spatial archaeology, agronomy, paleoclimatology and modelling. The various methods employed are the build-up of archaeobotanical and archaeological databases, the realization of morphometric, palaeogenomic and isotopic analyses on plant remains, as well as the analysis of multidisciplinary data by geostatistical methods and modelling (agroecosystemic modelling, Multi-Agent Systems). The investigation will focus on four geographical areas selected for their archaeological and archaeobotanical potential, distributed along a north-south transect, in environmentally and climatically varied regions: the Paris Basin, Mediterranean France, south-eastern Spain (Andalusia, Valencia region) and Morocco. Beyond agriculture, the primary source of food and wealth before the industrial revolution, the challenge of MICA is 1) to achieve a better understanding of the impact of climate on demographics and the economy, 2) to identify the adaptations and choices made by societies to ensure the resilience and transformation of production systems.