SEA LEVEL CHANGES DURING THE HOLOCENE IN MALTA AND BARI, CENTRAL MEDITERRANEAN

During the last decade several papers have been published to estimate the relative sea-level change from coastal archaeological indicators in many locations of the Italian coasts and the Mediter-ranean Sea. Anyway, the use of the archaeological information has been poorly focused for Middle Ages and the Bronze Age, due to a few of available coastal installations for these periods. In this paper, we focus on two areas of the Mediterranean, namely the coasts of Malta island and Bari, in Apulia (Southern Italy), that displays coastal archaeological markers of the Bronze age and Middle ages, respectively. The elevation of the selected markers were compared against the latest model prediction of Lambeck et al. (2011). Our observations indicate that Malta is tectonically stable or slightly subsiding at smaller rates. The palaeoenvironmental reconstruction of the coastlines at different time windows for his area, are in agreement with the timing of the mammals colonization of the island, occurred during Pleistocene. For Apulia, we show and discuss an archaeological maker of the Middle Ages, to reconstruct the story of the sea level changes in the last 1000 years at the St. Nicholas Basilica, built in 1087 AD along the coast of Bari. Since this coastal area is unaffected by significant vertical tectonic motion during the last 125 ky, our data detail the timing of the relative sea level rise since the Middle Ages and can be used to improve the predicted sea level curve for this region during the last 1000 years.