DC 6 – Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain
Sara Krubeck is an environmental archaeologist with a special interest in interdisciplinary approaches towards livelihoods in the past. At Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, she completed the bachelor programme Ancient Studies with a focus on Prehistoric Archaeology, including a one-year Erasmus exchange to Université Lumière Lyon 2, France. Her combined interest in archaeobotany and underwater archaeology, expressed in her bachelor’s thesis on waterlogged wooden remains from Neolithic and Bronze Age Alpine lake settlements, then led Sara to Kiel University, Germany, for her master studies in Prehistoric and Historic Archaeology. She received the Scientific Diver Certificate and participated in the archaeological documentation of a submerged shipwreck.
Sara then specialised in botanical macrofossil analysis, with a master’s thesis on the plant inventory from a Neolithic settlement in Northern Germany, for which she won two awards. During her master programme, she also undertook another one-year Erasmus exchange, this time to University of Oslo, Norway. After graduating, Sara was recruited for the project management team of the collaborative research centre ‘Scales of Transformation’ (CRC 1266) at Kiel University, and later continued working in the CRCs archaebotanical research group. Now based in Barcelona, Spain, she has started her AGRI-DRY doctoral project on resilient traditional agriculture.
AGRI-DRY Project:
Resilience of ancient and traditional dryland agriculture
This research project aims to identify resilient ancient and traditional agricultural practices in drylands and analyse them within their dynamic human-environmental contexts. The ultimate goal is to contribute to sustainable and ecological policy-making. The project’s main objectives are to identify key characteristics of traditional agricultural practices that enhance the resilience and sustainability of a given farming system and to understand their socio-ecological effects over time in simulated and empirical dryland environments.
Drawing on Resilience Theory, the project proposes a novel ethnoarchaeological framework to assess the resilience of agricultural practices in response to environmental and climatic changes of the past. In order to gain insights into traditional ecological knowledge, a secondment is planned with the University of Botswana to conduct interviews with subsistence farmers in collaboration with DC-7 and DC-10. A further secondment is planned at the Aarhus University with a focus on developing an agent-based model. This computational tool allows to test agricultural practices, informed by archaeological examples, ethnohistoric records and the new ethnographic insights from Botswana, under variable dryland conditions. Results will finally be translated into contemporary contexts, offering historically grounded resilience strategies for dryland agriculture facing climate change.
AGRI-DRY 