The BIOLALIA Project
From the 5th century AD major political, economic and social transitions took place on the Italian peninsula, together with the occurrence of the so-called Justinian Plague pandemic, which further contributed to demographic contraction. All these events marked the end of the Roman period and the beginning of the Middle Ages.
Unveiling Resilience: The Emerging Frontier of Bioarchaeology in Understanding Human Response to Climate Change
Recent multidisciplinary research is revealing that this 6th century crisis was strongly influenced by unfavourable climatic events. Palaeoclimatic research has evidenced a worsening of climatic conditions in the Mediterranean area, with glacier advances, increase in rainfall, and volcanic eruptions leading to what has been termed “Late Antique Little Ice Age” (LALIA) from approximately 536 to 660 AD.
This period is well known from the environmental, archaeological and historical point of view, but is poorly investigated from the bioarchaeological perspective. Yet bioarchaeological evidence can offer important opportunities to investigate the complex interaction between environment and past populations.
The project BIOLALIA intends to elucidate the sensitivity of human systems to the full range of climatic variations as they occurred during the abrupt cooling phase of Late Antiquity.
A comprehensive examination will be conducted on a carefully curated set of 10 osteoarchaeological collections sourced from prominent archaeological sites across northern and central Italy. These collections, renowned for their meticulous documentation and preservation, will undergo thorough analysis employing a multidisciplinary framework.
Palaeopathological analysis will evaluate and interpret several parameters potentially related to climatic and environmental factors, such as physiological stress indicators (stature, cribra cranii, cribra orbitalia, linear enamel hypoplasia), and health indicators (maxillary sinusitis, otitis media, periosteal new bone formation).
Bioarchaeology's Role in Anticipating and Addressing Climate Change Challenges
The bioarchaeology of climate change is a new and groundbreaking line of research that could lead to an identification of factors that promoted human resilience during past periods of disadvantageous climatic conditions. The knowledge gained with BIOLALIA can provide a historical perspective to climate research applied to the present. Bioarchaeological records offer the potential to detect and understand how past human groups have responded to a period characterised by negative climate events, forming a sound basis for predicting how climate change could impact on our lives in the future and to the evaluation of a range of possible solutions.
