Vita

My study focuses on the paleoenvironmental reconstruction of Pleistocene landscapes in the Southern Caucasus, as well as the availability of wild useful plants and their exploitation by different groups of hominins according to their cultural capacities.

To this end, modern subfossil soil surface samples are the base to establish a regional statistical relationship between the standing vegetation and the pollen record. The resulting statistical correlation will be applied to fossil pollen assemblages from Paleolithic sites of Armenia and Georgia to reconstruct the paleovegetation and to detect changes in plant communities through time, indicating climatic changes. The resulting data will yield fundamental insights into the region’s vegetation dynamics and climate history, as well as the availability of plant resources for different groups of hominins.