2024 Events

This talk examines the role winds and currents played in influencing the outline, structure and nature of Western European seaborne empires and the environmental changes that resulted from that contact. [more]

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Despite the advent of significant wildlife protection laws since the early 1970s global populations of wildlife have fallen precipitously in the last 50 years. This talk explores why wildlife populations have declined, why wildlife protection laws have proven to be ineffective against and why narratives of successful wildlife protection have persisted despite overall population declines. [more]

The notion of ‘extreme events’ is widely discussed in various disciplines, and is a topic of increasing academic research. Rapid and dramatic environmental and climatic events are particularly prominent in this – including heat waves, volcanic eruptions, droughts, earthquakes, floods, etc. Several of these are forecast to increase in frequency and severity given current anthropogenic climate change, as widely discussed by organisations such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. [more]

Because they offer deep temporal perspectives, the historical and archaeological records of past cities have potential to make a unique contribution to understanding of urban resilience and urban adaptations to climate change today. I single out two approaches that illustrate the potentials and pitfalls of this kind of past-to-present transfer of knowledge: shocks and persistence. The responses of urban residents and institutions to diverse types of shock is a kind of specified resilience (i.e., resilience to what, who, when, and where), whereas the temporal fates of cities over time—persistence—provides insights on the general resilience of early cities. I explore reasons for the great difficulty in applying past knowledge to contemporary urban settings, particularly the near-complete disjunction between research on past resilience and research on past urbanism. [more]

The conference aims to explore what we know and what we would like to know about cultural dynamics and human-environment interactions in ancient Central Asia and Mongolia. The cross-disciplinary event will bring together local and international scholars with expertise in archaeology, archaeobotany, and palaeoenvironmental sciences in Central Asia and adjacent regions. It will be an excellent venue to present and exchange new research results and to encourage new research projects. [more]