During the late Pleistocene and Early Holocene, Northern Europe was populated by mobile hunter gatherers. Due to their non-sedentary lifestyle, traces of these
societies are difficult to find, which hampers our understanding of how they lived and developed. Some parts of the SW Baltic Sea, however, only drowned in the Holocene and may therefore preserve anthropogenic structures and landscapes from these Palaeolithic/ early Mesolithic times. Recently, a submerged stonewall, likely a Stone Age architecture used for hunting, has been discovered in the SW Baltic Sea.
A 3-years project (SEASCAPE) is funded by the Leibniz Association aiming to
understand in more details this structure, identify other hitherto unrecognized Stone Age megastructures, and reconstruct the paleo-environment in which these structures were build. The SEASCAPE project involves archaeologists, geologists, geophysicists and paleoclimatologists from the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research Warnemünde (IOW), the Leibniz-Zentrum für Archäologie (LEIZA), the University of Rostock and Kiel University.
In the frame of the SEASCAPE project, the Marine Geology Department of the IOW is seeking for two PhD students to:
Geo 06/2024 Analyse sediment cores retrieved from basins in the SW Baltic
Sea. The sediments will be used in a “multi-proxy” approach (sedimentology,
organic and inorganic geochemistry, micropalaeontology) to reconstruct paleoenvironmental conditions during the late Pleistocene and early Holocene, when the stonewall might have been build.
Geo 07/2024 Analyse marine geophysical (seismic, multibeam echosounder,
side-scan sonar) and visual data to reconstruct the detailed morphology and texture of the stonewall and search for other submerged Stone Age architectures at the bottom of the Baltic Sea.
Underwater Archaeology and Maritime History jobs 