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Pollen data were collected from a one-meter peat succession recovered from the top of the Tropea Promontory (Calabria), a territory continuously inhabited throughout Prehistory and Protohistory. The peat was deposited in a small pond/marsh that was gradually filled up. Six C-14 dates allowed the peat growth to be constrained to between ca. 3000 and 1000 calBC. Considerable landscape and land use changes occurred in the area in that time interval, due to both environmental changes and intensive human activities. An open landscape with scattered oak woods characterized the high plain, whereas on the wet soils surrounding the marsh, wet woodlands (Alnus), and hygrophilous vegetation (Cyperaceae) developed, their relative abundance being used to mark the local environmental evolution. The occurrence of different anthropogenic indicators reveals that the area was exploited for agricultural practices (cereal cultivation) and livestock grazing, the latter being the main activity practiced around the marsh between the Eneolithic (stable settlements) and the Early-Middle Bronze Age (seasonal presence). The possibility of climatic influence on the peat evolution was studied by comparisons with well-dated isotope records. The marsh contraction phase roughly coincides with the 4.2 ka calBP event, while the end of peat accumulation postdates the 3.0 ka calBP rapid climate change event.

Mediterranean Early Iron Age chronology was mainly constructed by means of Greek Proto-geometric and Geometric ceramic wares, which are widely used for chronological correlations with the Aegean. However, Greek Early Iron Age chronology that is exclusively based on historical evidence in the eastern Mediterranean as well as in the contexts of Greek colonisation in Sicily has not yet been tested by extended series of radiocarbon dates from welldated stratified contexts in the Aegean. Due to the high chronological resolution that is only achievable by (metric-scale) stratigraphic C-14-age-depth modelling, the analysis of 21 C-14-AMS dates on stratified animal bones from Sindos (northern Greece) shows results that immediately challenge the conventional Greek chronology. Based on pottery-style comparisons with other sites, the new dates for Sindos not only indicate a generally higher Aegean Early Iron Age chronology, but also imply the need for a revised understanding of the Greek periodisation system that will foreseeably have a major impact on our understanding of Greek and Mediterranean history.

The region of the upper Neckar and Ammer river valley is situated on the south-westernmost periphery of the overall distribution area of the earliest LBK in Europe. In a small side valley of the Ammer, we have been able to investigate in the past few years the two sites 'Lusse' and 'Unteres Feld' which have provided important information about the beginning and development of the Early Neolithic in southwestern Germany. From these two sites, we have a sequence of features from all phases of the LBK. Radiocarbon data obtained from short living samples (charred seeds, animal bones from ungulates and human bones) were combined with pottery stylistic data from the same features to construct an age-model that can be applied, simultaneously, on site-level (locally) as well as on supra-regional level. The data series was first analysed using the GaussWM-algorithm in the CalPal program (Version, 2019.5), by application of an assumed linear (equal phase-length) age-model, and then using OxCal (Version 4.3), by application of Bayesian Boundary analysis. Both methods come to practically identical results. The pottery stylistic development of the LBK can henceforth be described, locally, by application of the five Ammer Valley stages (AV 1-5), and which are in turn synchronised with the widely applicable chronological system of Meier-Arendt (1966) which itself has five phases (I-V). Although generally similar, the two systems show certain differences but which only become apparent due to the achieved high temporal resolution of a few decades. An important observation is that in the Ammer Valley material with typological features of the earliest LBK (AV 1) can also be found in more recent LBK contexts, apparently undisturbed. In the upper Neckar region, in contrast, it is the Flomborn style (AV 2 and 3) that appears alongside the old pottery traditions. Put together, the old pottery traditions persisted for an exceptionally long time, in the newly founded settlements in the Amme

A repeating pattern of multi-centennial-scale Holocene climate events has been widely (globally) documented, and they were termed Rapid Climate Change (RCC) events. Non-seasalt potassium ion (K+) series in Greenland ice cores provide well-constrained timings for the events, and a direct timing relationship has been inferred between these events and the frequency of northerly cold polar/continental air outbreaks over the eastern Mediterranean Sea through gaps in the mountain ranges along the northern margin of the basin. There also appears to be a remarkable timing agreement with major archaeological turnover events in the Aegean/Levantine region. Yet no physically consistent assessment exists for understanding the regional climatic impacts of the events around this critical region. We present a simple 2-dimensional Lagrangian model, which yields a broad suite of physically coherent simulations of the impacts of frequency changes in winter-time northerly air outbreaks over the Aegean/Levantine region. We validate this with existing reconstructions from palaeoclimate proxy data, with emphasis on well-validated sea-surface temperature reconstructions and a highly resolved cave speleothem stable oxygen isotope record from Lebanon. Given that the RCCs were clearly marked by negative sea surface temperature anomalies in the region, we find that the predominant climatic impacts of this winter-time mechanism were “cold and wet,” in contrast with intercalated “warmer and more arid” conditions of non-RCC periods. More specifically, the RCCs are found to be periods of highly variable conditions, with an overall tendency toward cold and wet conditions with potential for flash flooding and for episodic snow-cover at low altitudes, at least in the lower-altitude (lower 1–1.5 km) regions of Crete and the Levant. The modelled winter-anomaly process cannot address underlying longer-term, astronomically forced trends, or the relatively warm and arid anomalies in between RCCs. The lat

Close examination of the geographic position of Early Neolithic settlements in SE-Europe shows that the oldest sites are almost exclusively situated in some very specific biogeographic areas. These earliest Neolithic settlements are all concentrated in a region that Pavle Cikovac calls the Sub-Mediterranean-Aegean (SMA) biogeographic region. It covers the northern and north-western edge of the Aegean, including Thessaly, Greek Macedonia and Greek Thrace, and extends further into the Balkans, but only along the valleys of the Vardar (Axios), Struma (Strymon) and Mesta (Nestos) rivers. Surprisingly, although Thrace is the closest landscape to Anatolia, it does not contain any sites of the earliest phase of the Neolithic at all beyond the narrow zone of the northern Marmara. In the present paper we explain this remarkable situation in terms of the natural environment in this particular region of the Southern Balkans. To begin, we propose that the lack of oldest Early Neolithic settlements in Thrace is related to the extreme microclimate of this region. As shown by modern vegetation analogues, Thracian oriental hornbeam-downy oak forests are exposed to stronger continental influence with frosts in the winter and average temperatures during the coldest months that are ca. 2-3 degrees C lower than those in the Central Balkans that have Sub-Mediterranean vegetation. In general terms, what we may expect is that the earliest Neolithic groups would first appear in regions with similarly mild conditions, on a yearly average, to those in the Mediterranean. Such mild conditions are indeed present in the SMA biogeographic region. On the other hand, before moving further to the north along the north-south oriented river systems of the Central Balkans, the Neolithic economy based on agriculture and stockbreeding would first have to be adapted to the relatively harsh winters in the Balkans. In consequence, it would have been possible to apply the new Neolithic lifestyle in the neigh