Database: M-ARCHives. Temporal and spatial distribution of marine taxa in Mediterranean sea

The newly launched ERC-CoG MERMAID project proposes an integrated study to understand the relationship between environmental pressure on marine resources and the impact of human communities on marine ecosystems in the ancient Mediterranean Sea. A multidisciplinary approach is applied to reconstruct past ecosystems, marine resources and their exploitation from the Paleolithic to historical times. A...rcheo-ichthyological and conchyliological studies have increased in the last decades in the Mediterranean and cover almost all periods of prehistory and antiquity. In this report we present the first task of the project, which consists in the implementation of a database management system (M-ARCHives) designed to store datasets of marine animal remains recovered from archaeological excavations. The importance of the corpus lies in the biogeographical extent and wide chronological span that will allow covering a variety of environmental and socio-economic contexts. The aim is to address environmental and cultural aspects linked to the presence/abundance of species at different scales of resolution.
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