Lake Ganau in the Rania Plain in Iraqi Kurdistan. A new limnic archive for palaeoenvironmental studies and the investigation of man-environment interaction

自全新世开始以来，中东新月沃地一直受到人类定居和农业的青睐。自新石器时代以来，该地区对动植物的开发也很重要。在过去的十年里，考古学家开始研究伊拉克库尔德斯坦的文化遗迹。该地区文化遗迹具有多周期遗址数量多、密度大的特点。对于伊朗-图拉尼亚生物气候区，植物考古学家最近对原始自然植被已被人类破坏到目前状态的科学学说提出了质疑。相反，人们认为，当植物从它们的冰川避难所迁移过来时，最早的定居者就已经开始管理景观了，所以全新世的植被一直是人类管理的结果。然而，与丰富的考古资源相比，伊拉克库尔德斯坦地区用于研究人与环境相互作用的自然档案却十分匮乏。因此，我们建议对伊拉克库尔德斯坦拉尼亚平原的加瑙湖进行试点研究。古环境研究新档案与人-环境相互作用研究——伊拉克库尔德斯坦加瑙湖湖泊沉积物古环境重建新档案我们将从湖底取回沉积物岩心，进行初步的考古植物学分析和数字年代测定。总体目标是测试Ganau湖沉积物岩心是否适合未来的研究，其中可能包括高分辨率孢粉学分析以及进一步的古生物组学，物理化学和同位素研究，这些研究适用于重建从末次冰期到全新世以及全新世人类居住的古环境过渡时期的景观。

The Fertile Crescent in the Middle East has been favored by man for settlement and agriculture since the beginning of the Holocene. Since Neolithic times the area has also been important for plant and animal exploitation. In the last decade archaeologists began to study the cultural remains of Iraqi Kurdistan. The cultural remains in this region are characterized by the high number and density of multi-periodic tell sites. For the Irano-Turanian bioclimatic region archaeobotanists recently questioned the scientific doctrine that the primary natural vegetation has been devastated to its present state by man. Instead, it is assumed, that the earliest settlers managed the landscape already when plants remigrated from their glacial refugia, so that the Holocene vegetation was always the result of human management. However, in contrast to the archaeological wealth, natural archives to investigate man-environment interaction are scarce in Iraqi Kurdistan. Therefore, here we suggest a pilot study 'Lake Ganau in the Rania Plain in Iraqi Kurdistan. A new limnic archive for palaeoenvironmental studies and the investigation of man-environment interaction' on a new archive for palaeoenvironmental reconstruction, i.e. the limnic sediments from Lake Ganau in Iraqi Kurdistan. We will retrieve sediment cores from the lake bottom and perform preliminary archaeobotanical analyses and numeric dating. The overall aim is to test the suitability of the Lake Ganau sediment cores for future research, which may include high-resolution palynological analyses as well as further palaeobiolimnic, physico-chemical and isotopic investigations that are suitable to reconstruct the landscape at the transition from the last glacial to the Holocene as well as the Holocene man-inhabited palaeoenvironment.