Transformations of maritime and island landscapes in the western France over the last 8,000 years : a long story of the links between Human and Environment
Résumé
For several years, research work is conducted in the western part of the French Atlantic coast to study changes in coastal and island landscapes and their links with past societies. This interdisciplinary research is conducted in a French iLTER (Long-Term Ecological Research). This proposal aims to synthesize the results and to present the latest advances in this field.
Our efforts have focused on a better understanding of the Holocene Relative Sea-Level (RSL) rise using salt-marsh foraminifera. The RSL data were then used to perform simulations on the paleogeographic changes from bathymetric and terrestrial Lidar data. This work was crossed with an extensive program of archaeological excavations and shed new light on the living conditions of the island societies of the Neolithic and the Bronze Age. Efforts have also been made to reconstruct the transformations of vegetation landscapes. Results highlighted deforestation processes due to the development of agriculture and metallurgy practices. Ongoing work continues the analysis of sediment cores and is now trying to reconstruct the climatic signal, especially periodic cold events that characterize climate variability in the North Atlantic Ocean. Work is also conducted on underwater landscapes to better document some archaeological remains such as fisheweirs. Biologists are interested in several shell middens discovered on the islands of the Iroise Sea and use a sclerochronological approach to study changes in the marine and coastal environments. These different approaches lead to refine our vision of landscape transformations during the mid- to late-Holocene period.
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