This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Researchers have shown how dramatic sea-level rise over a 5,000-year period profoundly changed the coasts of northern Italy, Slovenia and northern Croatia. Successive shaping and reshaping of coastal features influenced the lives of Mesolithic and Neolithic people and the development of local communities.
Land that hunter-gatherers once roamed and farmers later tended now lies deep beneath the sea. The study, led by the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom and the National Institute of Oceanography and Applied Geophysics (OGS) in Italy, reconstructs the evolution of the region's landscape between 9,000 and 4,000 B.C. It shows how, over millennia, staggered rises in sea level—at times up to 25 millimeters per year—transformed the landscape and progressively submerged plains to create wetlands and lagoons.
As the sea rose, pushing inland, it swallowed features it had previously formed, shaped new ones and eventually formed the origins of the coast we see today. The present-day Venice Lagoon, famous for its island city built on marshy, muddy ground, was once dry land that lay kilometers from the coast. The same can be said of other towns in the lagoons farther east, such as Grado, and even present-day coastal cities like Trieste would once have been located in hills overlooking swamps and lagoons below.
The study's findings are published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews. Archaeologist Samuele Ongaro, lead author and Ph.D. researcher at the University of Southampton, says, "Submerged landscapes are an important missing piece in the study of prehistory, especially in the northern Adriatic. They hold many secrets about how our ancestors lived and how they were connected to the land.
"The results of this research allow us to reconstruct these lost landscapes, what environments they hosted, how they changed over time, and what significance they might have held for prehistoric populations—a fundamental step for future archaeological research in the area." The researchers combined existing data from the analysis of sediment cores with new, high-resolution geophysical data from OGS. By identifying different types of sediment and modeling successive flooding, the team revealed the backward shifting of coastal barriers (deposits parallel to the shore) and back-barrier systems (the marshy areas beyond). Different stages across the 5,000-year timeline include: The findings highlight the constantly changing environment that Mesolithic hunter-gatherers had to cope with, altering habitats, resources and the availability of food, such as plants, fish and animal prey.
The team hopes further study will reveal more about how communities shifted activities in response to coastal flooding and how this eventually affected the advent of farming in the region by Neolithic people. "The variety of coastal environments—lagoons, river deltas, marshes and swamps—would have been an attractive landscape for foragers and hunters, but the flat nature of the landscape also made it prone to significant land loss. Communities were forced to adapt over time, choosing where to hunt, fish and settle," Ongaro comments.
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