Forest resources and environmental impact assessment of human activities in the Sagalassos territory of the past

The PhD study aims at contributing to the environmental impact assessment of human
activities in the Sagalassos territory of the past. In a first phase, the PhD will focus on
producing life cycle inventory (LCI) data for wood resource use through time. In a second
phase, it will use these and other available inventory data (e.g. water use, heavy metal
pollution, etc.) to perform time and space explicit life cycle assessments (LCA). The
Sagalassos/Ağlasun region, being a rural area throughout its history, can be considered a
“controlled solar energy system’’ (i.e. based on extraction of biomass from natural and
managed ecosystems). In order to understand its social-ecological metabolism, it is vital to
understand the land use dynamics (i.e. the source of biomass used by the society). Land use
information will be gathered through a compilation of previous work and new activities.
In the first phase, given the importance of wood as an energy source, the wood resource use
and availability through time will be reconstructed by running the GREFOS forest succession
model taking into account past climate change (based on improved dendroclimatological
information) and human induced disturbance (fire, grazing and wood harvesting). The wood
harvesting is derived from the XYLARCH wood consumption model that will be further
parameterized for periods other than the Roman imperial and adding more human activities
(e.g. households, glass and metal production). The obtained wood resource composition and
availability will be validated with published paleobotanical evidence and available paleocharcoal
from excavations.

In the second step, an open source time and space explicit LCA software in development,
called TEMPORALIS, which is part of the broader free and open source LCA project
Brightway2, will be applied to perform LCA’s for past societies (as a whole and for separate
economic sectors). In this task, the inventory of spatio-temporal flows between nature and
society are entered into the LCI database so as to obtain maps of resource use and flows
over time, the basis for the social-ecological metabolism analysis. LCA results will be
calculated and interpreted in an interdisciplinary context of archaeology and environmental
science.

This PhD is part of a large project “The role of change in long-term regional development:
Approaching the dynamic metabolism of social-ecological systems in the Sagalassos/Ağlasun
region“ funded by the research fund KU Leuven and executed by a multidisciplinary team
from Archaeology (Jeroen Poblome, project leader), Ecology (Bart Muys, supervisor of this
PhD), Spatial and Environmental planning (Pieter Van den Broeck), Social Geography
(Maarten Loopmans), Visual Data Analysis (Jan Aerts), Design and Emerging Technologies
(Andrew Vande Moere).