Overview of OLEA project
Mediterranean sylvo-agropastoral landscapes are the result of a long-term socio-environmental and climate interactions, where the diversity of human practices (e.g., pastoralism, agriculture and wood management) resulted in the formation of a highly valuable mosaic landscape. This landscape consists of both woodlands and open areas with crop fields and pastures. Islands constitute prone environments to study cultural and environmental processes though time as they tend to be less resilient to change that mainland. In the Balearic Islands, the mosaic-like landscape is represented by the alternation of wild-olive macchia and garrigues with open areas since the last 5,000 years based on the study of fossil pollen. To understand how landscape changed and how such type of mosaic-like landscape, the integration of paleoenvironmental, archaeological and archaeobotanical data is necessary, by using mother methods and analytical techniques.
The olive tree (Olea europaea L.) is a prominent feature of current circum-Mediterranean landscapes and a fundamental element of the modern Mediterranean agricultural economy. It is one of the most important trees in the Mediterranean basin, economically and because of its cultural and symbolic value. Wild olive (Olea europaea var. sylvestris (Miller) Lehr) is also common in macchia and garrigues across the Mediterranean climate region. Recent research pointed out that the spread of olive orchards is likely to be driven by different factors in different areas, and thus to tackle this issue is necessary to couple regional palaeoenvironmental records with local archaeobotanical/archaeological data. The integration of both off-site (natural sequences) and on-site (archaeological sites) data is an essential tool to shed light on the cultivation and large-scale management of this tree.
The main aims of the OLEA project are i) to uncover drivers that have previously been implied in the spread of olive tree macchia, tracing the origins of Balearic landscape back in times, and ii) to trace in fine detail, and in still unexplored ways, the history of olive tree horticulture and management since the earliest human arrival in the Balearic Islands.
By doing so, OLEA will contribute to: 1) understanding how past islanders faced societal and climate challenges in restrict European environments and gather lessons learnt from the responses of these communities relating to the resilience of these communities and how they managed risk; 2) offering key insights into vegetation responses to past climate oscillations, including suitable analogies for the present-day and future Global Climate Change; 3) gaining insights on how migration processes and colonisation influenced the landscape and the inhabitants of the islands.