Under the direction of Dr. Michael Kolb and Dr. Jay Stravers, Mr. Chad Heinzel will collect data for his doctoral dissertation. He will continue his participation in archaeological excavations of the Sicilian-Scandinavian Archaeological Project in western Sicily's Salemi Region. The project is investigating the primary, social and environmental, factors leading to the rise and fall of an indigenous society during Sicily's Late Bronze Age to Early Iron Age (1100 to 600 BC) transition. The Salemi Region provides landscape sediment-assemblages, fluvial and alluvial fan sedimentation that contains a well-preserved geoarchaeological record. This record is especially significant because it retains important indicators of past climatic, landscape, and social changes. Preliminary excavations and survey have successfully revealed the presence of a major hilltop settlement that includes, streets, walls, fortification towers, nearby springs and streams, fossil land snail shells, and adjacent agriculturally rich slopes.
Understanding the environmental factors responsible for landscape development in any geologic setting is a critical step towards identifying natural versus human induced landscape modifications. Mr. Heinzel's research will provided an important high-resolution climatic data set for the past 15,000 years in western Sicily. Such information will provide a physical context for on-going archaeological (Late Bronze through Roman Age) excavations in the western Mediterranean region. These data will provide a platform from which local and regional interpretations of cultural development and landscape usage patterns will be made. Mr. Heinzel's use of fossil snail shells will serve as an indicator of time (Carbon dating) of deposition/occupation and past climate change (stable isotopic Carbon and Oxygen geochemistry) is a first in Sicily. Well-preserved snail shells recovered from the project's geologic and archaeological excavations will provide insightful data regarding past changes in rainfall, temperature, and vegetative cover.
This research is important because it contributes new environmental information regarding past abrupt climatic changes and agricultural developments in western Sicily that are essential unknown variables in our current state of knowledge. These environmental data will provide insight when interpreting the daily lives of Sicily's pre-historic and historic evolving occupational phases. In addition, these data will be available for future climate models in the Mediterranean region. Models that may predict the effects of future climatic change and land use practices on our own developing society. Mr. Heinzel's research also rescues and records information from contemporary destructive agricultural practices and assists in the training of a promising young scientist.
