Guest lecture: Climate, Environment, and Society in the Premodern World: Exploring the intersections between people and landscapes through parchments, pollens, and proxies
Aika
8.12.2023 klo 11.15 - 12.15
Edward ”Ned” Schoolman (Associate Professor, University of Nevada): “Climate, Environment, and Society in the Premodern World: Exploring the intersections between people and landscapes through parchments, pollens, and proxies”
ABSTRACT: How did past societies manage complex landscapes? How did they deal with climate change? And how could we possibly know? This public lecture introduces the range of evidence that helps modern historians and scientists reconstruct past landscapes and climate, and our current understanding of the many drivers of environmental change. In studying historical, archaeological, and palaeoecological records and archives, we are able to discover the ways in which communities survived the political disintegration of the Roman Empire and took advantage of climate change during the Medieval Warming Period, how past landscapes responded to the Little Ice Age and the Black Death, and more generally the interrelationship between climate, environment, and past societies. While these trends are global in nature, this lecture will focus on Italy, where the records of fossil pollens and written documents allow for detailed analysis within narrow timeframes, and will conclude on the resiliency of local communities.
The guest lecture is organized by the project “Rethinking the late Medieval Relic, c. 1200-1550” (Finnish Research Council, no. 349210) in collaboration with the Department of Cultural History and Turku Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies.
More information: Academy Research Fellow Marika Räsänen, marika.rasanen@utu.fi
ABSTRACT: How did past societies manage complex landscapes? How did they deal with climate change? And how could we possibly know? This public lecture introduces the range of evidence that helps modern historians and scientists reconstruct past landscapes and climate, and our current understanding of the many drivers of environmental change. In studying historical, archaeological, and palaeoecological records and archives, we are able to discover the ways in which communities survived the political disintegration of the Roman Empire and took advantage of climate change during the Medieval Warming Period, how past landscapes responded to the Little Ice Age and the Black Death, and more generally the interrelationship between climate, environment, and past societies. While these trends are global in nature, this lecture will focus on Italy, where the records of fossil pollens and written documents allow for detailed analysis within narrow timeframes, and will conclude on the resiliency of local communities.
The guest lecture is organized by the project “Rethinking the late Medieval Relic, c. 1200-1550” (Finnish Research Council, no. 349210) in collaboration with the Department of Cultural History and Turku Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies.
More information: Academy Research Fellow Marika Räsänen, marika.rasanen@utu.fi