Influence of explosive vocanism and synsedimentary faulting on Plio-Pleistocene palaeoenvironments - implications for Oldowan hominid land use at Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania

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Olduvai Gorge is a valley adjacent to the Eastern Rift Valley in Northern Tanzania that exposes excellently a series of Plio-Pleistocene fluvio-lacustrine and interleaved volcaniclatic beds. The succession is famous for hominid remains, rich artefacts and fossil assemblages. Tuff beds provide the basis for the Oldowan stratigraphic framework and for the correlation and dating of archaeological funds. To understand the successions palaeoenvironmental and ecological record and its implications for hominid land use, a detailed process-oriented volcaniclastic facies analysis is proposed. Effects of differential tectonic subsidence such as fault-related thickness and facies changes as well as widespread incision surfaces, that downcut to varying degrees into underlying strata, complicate previously applied stratigraphic models and will be examined by detailed 3D surveying. Incision surfaces provide the key elements for the proper understanding of Olduvai stratigraphy and most probably also for condentrations of archaeological remains. Allostratigraphy and the principles of Sequence Stratigraphy together with Tephrostratigraphy are applied to develop a much more powerful and widespread chronostratigraphic framework. The project integrates data on palaeoenvironments, synsedimentary tectonism and volcanism with hominid land use models contributed by palaeoanthroplogists of the multidisciplinary OLAPP research group.