Climate dynamics during the last 3000 years forced environmental and sedimentation changes in southern Spain: The Laguna Grande de Archidona record Jiménez Moreno, Gonzalo García-Alix Daroca, Antonio Gázquez, Fernando Castillo-Baquera, Aurora Martegani, Lucía Rodríguez-Rodríguez, Miguel Rodrigo Gámiz, Marta Jiménez-Espejo, Francisco Vegetation Sedimentation Climate Human impact Late Holocene Western Mediterranean This study was supported by projects PID2021-125619OB-C21/C22 and PID2021-123980OA-I00 (GYPCLIMATE), funded by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación of Spain, the Agencia Estatal de Investigación and the Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional FEDER MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/FEDER, UE” and CGL2017-85415-R,; Junta de Andalucía I + D + i Junta de Andalucía 2020 Retos P-20-00059, UGR-FEDER B-RNM-144-UGR18, UGR-FEDER A-RNM-336-UGR20, Project cofinanced by FEDER and LifeWatch-Eric LifeWatch-2019-10-UGR-01 and the research group RNM-190 (Junta de Andalucía). Funding also came from "Red de investigación temática PALEONET (RED24-153734-T) financiada por la Agencia Estatal de Investigación del Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades". F.G acknowledges the Ramón y Cajal fellowship, RYC2020-029811-I de la Agencia Estatal de Investigación and the grant PPIT-UAL, Junta de Andalucía-FEDER 2022-2026 (RyC-PPI2021-01). L.M. was funded by the FPU21/06924 grant of the Ministerio de Educación y Formación Profesional of Spain. A geochemical, mineralogical, and sedimentological analysis of the sedimentary record from Laguna Grande de Archidona (LGA), a lake in southern Spain, produced a high-resolution climate and human activity record for the southwestern Mediterranean over the past three millennia. Lake level changes, organic matter, and gypsum intervals were primarily driven by precipitation and hydrological shifts. From 3300 to 2600 cal yr BP, dry conditions prevailed, particularly from 3050 to 2600 cal yr BP, coinciding with a regional drought tied to a positive North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). The wettest period, from 2600 to 1400 cal yr BP during the Iberian Roman Humid Period (IRHP), was marked by increased groundwater and lake stratification due to negative NAO, which generated the precipitation of gypsum and manganese oxides. However, this relatively wetter period was interrupted by two arid events between 2300–2200 and 2150–2050 cal yr BP. A dry phase spanned the Dark Ages through the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA; 1400–700 cal yr BP), while the Little Ice Age (LIA) showed varied but generally wetter conditions, followed by an arid period from ∼1600–1850 CE. The Industrial Epoch (1850–1957 CE) also saw dryness, with late 20th-century changes attributed to modern climate impacts and irrigation practices. 2025-05-07T08:56:17Z 2025-05-07T08:56:17Z 2025-08 journal article Jiménez-Moreno, G., García-Alix, A., Gázquez, F., Castillo-Baquera, A., Martegani, L., Rodríguez-Rodríguez, M., Rodrigo-Gámiz, M., Jiménez-Espejo, F.J., 2025. Climate dynamics during the last 3000 years forced environmental and sedimentation changes in southern Spain: The Laguna Grande de Archidona record. Catena_256, 109123. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.catena.2025.109123 https://hdl.handle.net/10481/103975 10.1016/j.catena.2025.109123 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ open access Atribución 4.0 Internacional Elsevier