About project

European landscapes are cultural–natural hybrids: today’s biodiversity patterns were not only shaped by climate and ecology, but also by centuries of human land use, governance, and ideology. MEMELAND addresses a central gap in our understanding of this legacy by reconstructing biodiversity and land-use trajectories at species level over the last two millennia—precisely the period in which many lowland prehistoric systems were replaced by medieval and early-modern landscapes.

To do this, MEMELAND integrates cutting-edge molecular proxies with established archaeological and palaeoecological approaches. We analyse sediment cores from 50 paired lakes (100 sites): one site located near documented elite/high-status medieval archaeology and a nearby control site with little or no comparable archaeological signal. This paired-site strategy allows us to disentangle local variability from regional trends and to test hypotheses about the “medieval agricultural revolution”, population change, technologies (e.g., the heavy/mouldboard plough), and shifting land-management regimes across three contrasting archaeological zones (non-Romanised north, central Europe, and Romanised northern Europe).

The project is a Synergy collaboration led from Arctic University of Norway, together with the University of Oxford, Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag), and the University of Salzburg, plus partner at Charles University. Alongside scientific publications, MEMELAND commits to open science and to returning site-level results directly to local collaborators, with interactive outputs made available through the project website. See Research Teams and People for more information.