Publication Science Advances
22 novembre 2023
The dahliagram: An interdisciplinary tool for investigation, visualization, and communication of past human-environmental interaction
Investigation into the nexus of human-environmental behavior has seen increasing collaboration of archaeologists, historians, and paleo-scientists. However, many studies still lack interdisciplinarity and overlook incompatibilities in spatiotemporal scaling of environmental and societal data and their uncertainties. Here, we argue for a strengthened commitment to collaborative work and introduce the “dahliagram” as a tool to analyze and visualize quantitative and qualitative knowledge from diverse disciplinary sources and epistemological backgrounds. On the basis of regional cases of past human mobility in eastern Africa, Inner Eurasia, and the North Atlantic, we develop three dahliagrams that illustrate pull and push factors underlying key phases of population movement across different geographical scales and over contrasting periods of time since the end of the last Ice Age. Agnostic to analytical units, dahliagrams offer an effective tool for interdisciplinary investigation, visualization, and communication of complex human-environmental interactions at a diversity of spatiotemporal scales.
Fig. 2. Dahliagram analyses of human movement in east Africa/southern Arabia.
(A) Younger Dryas (YD) [~12,900 to 11,700 before present (B.P.)], (B) Early Holocene (~11,700 to 8200 B.P.), (C) Late Holocene (~8200 to 3000 B.P.), (D) pre-Aksumite period (~2800 to 2050 B.P. ), and (E) multiperiod composite dahliagram for east Africa.
Références
Michael Frachetti, Nicole Di Cosmo, Jan Esper, Lamya Khalidi, Franz Mauelshagen, Clive Oppenheimer, Ulf Büntgen – The dahliagram: An interdisciplinary tool for investigation, visualization, and communication of past human-environmental interaction – Science Advances, Vol 9, Issue 47 – DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adj3142
