Daniel Barragan, Julien Schirrmacher, Mara Weinelt and Aleta Neugebauer working on the drill core in Kiel 

Heat waves, droughts and water supply problems: Caused by man-made climate change, the Iberian Peninsula is currently developing into a climate hotspot. A look into the past might help in assessing the consequences and finding solutions for upcoming challenges. In cooperation with researchers from Spain and Portugal, scientists from ROOTS and the CRC 1266 are investigating changes in past societies and connectivities with the environment during climate stress.
In spring, the team took a 19-metre-long drill core from a former lagoon northwest of Seville in order to reconstruct environmental changes over the past 6000 years. A special focus of the project is the period about 4200 years ago, when the largest Copper Age settlement in Andalusia was located there. A natural climate change occurred during this era at the transition from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age with distinct traces in the archaeological material. With the new drill core, the team hopes to gain more precise insights into these developments: "This is possibly the first climate archive ever on the Iberian Peninsula where we can see changes in temperatures, precipitation and plant growth per year," says Mara Weinelt, one of the project coordinators. The analysis of the core is now being carried out in laboratories in Kiel.