On 20 March 2026, Ella Egberts presented the results of her postdoctoral research at the ninth international Landscape Archaeology Conference (LAC), held in the historic city centre of Bamberg. Her talk was part of the session “Terraced Landscapes as Socio-Ecological Archives.”
Landscape archaeology explores the relationships between human occupation strategies, material culture, and the natural environment in the past. Within this field, terraced landscapes stand out as striking examples of how people have shaped and adapted to challenging environments over time.
In her presentation, Ella shared findings from her research in the United Arab Emirates, where she has been dating and analysing terrace systems. Her work demonstrates that the construction and use of these terraces can be linked to wetter climatic phases in the recent past. By applying a multimethod approach, she showed how human–environment interactions can be reconstructed at relatively fine temporal scales. The terraces of the UAE’s Hajar Mountains, she argued, represent an important yet largely underexplored archive for understanding broader patterns of land use and human adaptation within their socio-economic and historical context, particularly in relation to recent climatic variability.