Lake Ganau in the Rania Plain in Iraqi Kurdistan. A new limnic archive for palaeoenvironmental studies and the investigation of man-environment interaction

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Manfred Rösch
• Subject Area: Egyptology and Ancient Near Eastern Studies ; Prehistory and World Archaeology
• Term: Funded in 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 269256454

The Fertile Crescent in the Middle East has been favored by man for settlement and agriculture since the beginning of the Holocene. Since Neolithic times the area has also been important for plant and animal exploitation. In the last decade archaeologists began to study the cultural remains of Iraqi Kurdistan. The cultural remains in this region are characterized by the high number and density of multi-periodic tell sites. For the Irano-Turanian bioclimatic region archaeobotanists recently questioned the scientific doctrine that the primary natural vegetation has been devastated to its present state by man. Instead, it is assumed, that the earliest settlers managed the landscape already when plants remigrated from their glacial refugia, so that the Holocene vegetation was always the result of human management. However, in contrast to the archaeological wealth, natural archives to investigate man-environment interaction are scarce in Iraqi Kurdistan. Therefore, here we suggest a pilot study 'Lake Ganau in the Rania Plain in Iraqi Kurdistan. A new limnic archive for palaeoenvironmental studies and the investigation of man-environment interaction' on a new archive for palaeoenvironmental reconstruction, i.e. the limnic sediments from Lake Ganau in Iraqi Kurdistan. We will retrieve sediment cores from the lake bottom and perform preliminary archaeobotanical analyses and numeric dating. The overall aim is to test the suitability of the Lake Ganau sediment cores for future research, which may include high-resolution palynological analyses as well as further palaeobiolimnic, physico-chemical and isotopic investigations that are suitable to reconstruct the landscape at the transition from the last glacial to the Holocene as well as the Holocene man-inhabited palaeoenvironment.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigators: Dr. Annette Kadereit; Dr. Simone Mühl