Objectives: It has recently been claimed that the time of major archaeological discoveries is over. CLIOARCH begs to differ: it will bring the insights and predictions of WPs I-IV to the field, and find one or several new stratified Final Palaeolithic sites. These will be excavated using the full suite of state-of-the-art excavation and post-excavation techniques in order to i) test the predictions of presence of a particular cultural taxonomic unit at a particular stratigraphic (i.e. chronological) position, to ii) test the specific predictions of our climatic modelling exercise using the palaeoenvironmental proxies recovered, and to iii) test particular hypotheses of human impacts relating to the Laacher See eruption and potentially other emerging forcing factors.

Methods: WP V will triangulate the legacy dataset of previously recorded rock-shelters in the heart of Europe, corresponding to the German Federal State of Hessen and the publically accessible cave register for the same region (https://hoehlenkataster-hessen.de/hoehlenkataster/kataster/) with a previously assembled database of Laacher See tephra occurrences. Together with high-resolution topographic information, these data will be used in a GIS-based predictive model to locate the most promising new sites for excavation. The Federal State of Hessen has not seen a great deal of research targeted at the Final Palaeolithic, but is located right in the centre of the study area. We know from previous work that open-air sites are unlikely to reveal duly stratified assemblages that can be used for valid taxonomic assessments as such sites are subject to a variety of difficult-to-assess biases in deposition, preservation and collecting. Furthermore, our previous attempts at retrieving tephra from open-air sites have shown mixed and generally poor results. In contrast, rock-shelters hold substantial potential here as they both acted as landscape attractors for Palaeolithic foragers and are sediment traps. With the addition of potential fallout tephra from the Laacher See eruption, WP V has the potential of discovering – not by chance or through development-led archaeology but following a rigorous predictive methodology – a series of Final Palaeolithic/earliest Mesolithic ‘mini-Pompeiis’ that would facilitate a combined test of a) the distribution models of WP IV in terms of site presence and of b) the new taxonomies of WP I/II in terms of assemblage content, and of c) the climate models of WP III in terms of the floral and faunal palaeoenvironmental information recovered.
If the search exercise is successful, the excavations will proceed using state-of-the-art digital recording techniques, and, preservation allowing, sedimentary DNA and micromorphology as well as radiometric dating will be applied to establish a high-resolved chronology for these sites.

Expected outcomes: Discovery and excavation of one or several stratified located in the heart of the study area and right underneath the medial fallout zone of the Laacher See eruption, which contain remains from the entire Final Palaeolithic/earliest Mesolithic.