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). SPP 2361 investigates the pre-industrial floodplains in Central Europe and the fluvial societies that operated there. 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.