Priority Programme “On the Way to the Fluvial Anthroposphere” (SPP 2361)
Deadline: 20. Juni 2025
In March 2021, the Senate of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) established the Priority Programme “On the Way to the Fluvial Anthroposphere” (SPP 2361). The programme is designed to run for six years. The present call invites proposals for the second three-year funding period (2026–2029). The submission deadline is 20 June 2025.
SPP 2361 investigates the pre-industrial floodplains in Central Europe and the fluvial societies that operated there. Floodplains are global hotspots of sensitive socio-environmental changes, exceptionally dynamic landscapes and key areas of cultural and natural heritage. Due to their high land-use capacity and the simultaneous necessity of land reclamation and risk minimisation, societies have radically restructured Central European floodplains. This anthropogenic restructuring can be so significant that former floodplains are no longer recognisable as such. The question therefore arises as to whether or when it is justified to understand specific floodplains as a “Fluvial Anthroposphere” and which socio-ecological processes have been involved in their development.
The Priority Programme aims to answer the questions of when and why humans became a significant controlling factor in floodplain formation and how humans in interaction with natural processes modified floodplains. It will clarify the extent to which short-term and long-term natural floodplain dynamics together with early human impacts affected subsequent developments and led to path dependencies. The Priority Programme encourages project proposals from archaeology, the geosciences and history that analyse the interaction of humans and their environments in the emergence of the Fluvial Anthroposphere through multidisciplinary and cutting-edge methodological approaches.
The spatial focus of individual projects must be on the Elbe, Rhine and Danube river systems, either one system, two systems or all three, in order to compare specific pathways of the gradual build-up of anthropogenic impacts on the floodplains as well as the development of interrelated fluvial societies. From a spatial perspective, projects must strictly focus on socio-natural sites in the floodplain itself with an emphasis on large to medium-scale tributaries (second and third order). In the second funding period (2026–2029), the focus should be on in-depth analysis and comparative perspectives of case studies, categorisations and transferable models at both intra- and inter-basin scales, particularly building on the results of the first funding period.
Projects must focus on the medieval and pre-industrial modern periods and be based upon the systematic overlay of historical, archaeological and geoscientific data that requires the methodological expertise of at least one discipline in the natural sciences and one in the humanities. However, earlier and later dimensions may be added to complement the medieval and pre-industrial focus in order to identify, quantify and assess anthropogenic changes and develop parameters and their related boundary levels towards and within the Fluvial Anthroposphere.
Each project must contribute to and theoretically reflect the concept and key hypothesis of a pre-modern emergence of a Fluvial Anthroposphere in the context of the global Anthroposphere/Anthropocene debate. All projects must contribute to innovative thematic and/or methodological developments of this research field and commit to a systematic cross-project classification framework based on (semi-)quantitative indices of anthropogenic impacts and their further joint development. This should particularly build on the results and research data management infrastructure of the first funding period.
