Postdoctoral Researcher (m/f/d) in the field of Prehisto ... (Wissenschaftliche/r Mitarbeiter/in)

The Leibniz Centre for Archaeology (LEIZA), a member of the Leibniz Association, is an archaeological research institute and museum operating worldwide, with its headquarters in Mainz and further locations in Neuwied, Mayen and Schleswig. Since its foundation in 1852, the museum has been dedicated to the material legacy of three million years of human history, with the aim of understanding human behaviour and actions, as well as the development and transformation of societies.

During the late Pleistocene and early Holocene, Northern Europe was inhabited by mobile hunter-gatherers. Due to their nomadic lifestyle, traces of these societies are hard to find, which makes it difficult to understand their way of life and development. However, some parts of the south-western Baltic Sea were only flooded during the Holocene and may therefore contain anthropogenic structures and landscapes from this Palaeolithic/early Mesolithic period. A sunken stone wall, likely dating from the Stone Age and used for hunting, was recently discovered in the south-western Baltic Sea. Similar hunting structures, which appear to have been used for the mass hunting of ungulate herds, have also been found in other parts of the world. A three-year project (SEASCAPE), funded by the Leibniz Association, aims to gain a more detailed understanding of this structure, to identify other previously unknown Stone Age megastructures on the Baltic Sea seabed, and to reconstruct the palaeoenvironmental conditions under which these structures were built. The SEASCAPE project involves researchers from the fields of archaeology, geology, geophysics and palaeo-climatology at the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research Warnemünde (IOW), the Leibniz-Centre for Archaeology, Schleswig location (LEIZA), the University of Rostock and Christian-Albrechts-University Kiel. As part of the SEASCAPE project, LEIZA Competence Area 1, ‘Pleistocene and Early Holocene Archaeology’, at the Schleswig location is responsible, within Work Package 1, for identifying common global characteristics of such structures that are crucial to their function. In addition, their impact on settlement patterns and the socio-economic structures of hunter-gatherer communities is to be investigated.