Environmental deterioration produced by human and natural factors was a significant stress agent in past-urban societies. Yet, an adverse environmental scenario did not necessarily lead to societal collapse. Understanding how ancient urban societies coped with environmental variation could provide information for evaluating current urban risk factors under the present climatic scenario. This project focuses on using both fossil and modern phytoliths to investigate how the inhabitants of ancient urban centers responded to environmental changes through time. Our research will focus on multilayered sites from Southern Levant, especially the site of Tell es-Safi/Gath. Multilayered sites such as Tel es-Safi/Gath offer the opportunity to study how urban societies negotiated climatic shifts and environmental deterioration. The project emphasizes the use of geoarchaeological methods to identify site formation processes involved in phytolith accumulation and will use stable isotope values from charred plant remains and a battery of 14C dating to exponentially improve the resolution of climatic reconstructions. The results will be compared to the regional proxies, the material culture record, and the textual sources to provide information on urban resilience strategies at multiple chronological, social, cultural, and spatial scales.

Although most historical scientists agree that agriculture has been shaping landscapes for millennia, it remains challenging to quantify the timing and intensity of past land use as well as its long-term (legacy) effects. Focusing on semi-arid Southwest Asia, the project integrates geospatial, geochemical, paleoenvironmental, and ethnographic approaches to examine the effects of known historical agricultural land use on modern soil micro-botanicals (phytoliths). The overall goal of this research is not only to define the precision with which phytoliths can be used to investigate ancient land use but also to empower future research by unlocking a potentially valuable source of information on human-environmental interactions.

Humans are the primary agent in site formation processes, to the point that without human activities archaeological sites can barely exist. The extent and intensity of such activities vary considerably from site to site, but the anthropogenic impact in archaeological sites has a general increasing tendency from the Pliocene to the Holocene, probably mimicking a pattern of global population growth. We seek to answer questions regarding the occupation intensity or the nature of the human activities by studying the microscopic remains and minerals in the sediments. Different types of activities will produce different types of mineral assemblages and microscopic remains. We believe that broad changes in the human impact in archaeological sites can reflect behavioral changes if the activities changed, or demographic changes if the activities remained the same but their intensity increased. By identifying these activities in the microscopic record and by estimating their intensity ALMA research aims to produce a revolutionary set of data that could contribute significantly to understand population changes in the past.

In human history one of the most substantial changes after the domestication of animals and plants was the emergence of urban entities. The extension of the settlement, the population density, the existence of specialized craftsmen, or the presence of public buildings has been interpreted as indicators of urban life. However, from our own research, we know that the spaces in the city weren't occupied at the same time, that some public buildings can be used as animal enclosures, and that agricultural activities are still performed inside the city. Using micro-remains such as phytoliths and dung spherulites, our research aims to answer two simple questions with complicated answers: how urban were ancient cities in the past? How urban life evolved in the past?