SSE1K
Science, Society and Environmental Change in the First Millennium CE

Helen Foxhall Forbes is Full Professor of medieval history and PI of SSE1K. She studied Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at the University of Cambridge (2001-2008) and Theology at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg-im-Breisgau (2007-2008). Subsequently she held posts at the universities of Cambridge (2008-2009), Leicester (2009-2012), Exeter (2012-2013) and Durham (2013-2022). Her research focuses on Europe and the Mediterranean from late antiquity to the early Middle Ages. Her particular research interests include environmental history and the links between human beings and their environments, the history of Christianity and of Christian theology, as well as intellectual history and the history of science. Her first book, Heaven and Earth in Anglo-Saxon England: Theology and Society in an Age of Faith (2013), was funded by a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship held at the University of Leicester. This research demonstrated the important connections between theology and its social context in early medieval England. She is a member of the Bova Marina Archaeological Project and has been involved with excavations in Calabria since 1999. She is also a member of the international advisory board for the Richard Rawlinson Center for Anglo-Saxon Studies and Manuscript Research (Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI) and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Michele Abballe obtained a PhD in Archaeology from Ghent University (BE), as part of a Joint Programme with the University of Verona (IT), focusing on reconstructing the diachronic evolution of the hinterland of Ravenna through geoarchaeological methods (2023). Between 2022 and 2023, he worked on remotely sensed data as a Post-graduate Research Fellow at the Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate (ISAC), National Research Council (CNR) of Italy. Prior to his PhD, he worked in commercial archaeology for six months after completing his BA and MA in Archaeology at the University of Bologna (2011-2017), with research stays at the University of Leicester (UK) and Leiden University (NL). Michele currently leads the GEOARCHAMMI project (GEOARCHAeological Mapping with VHR Multispectral Imagery) supported by ESA (2022-2024). Additionally, he is respectively co-director and field director of RecLands (since 2023) and Faventia (since 2019) projects, studying settlement patterns evolution in the plain north of Ravenna and Faenza with a strong focus on human-environmental interactions over the long term. As part of the SSE1K project, Michele is investigating how settlement patterns in the Western Mediterranean coped with climate and environmental variations during the 1st millennium CE, combining available archaeological data (such as settlement data and C14 dates) with natural proxies (such as hydroclimatic reconstructions and pollen data).

Massimiliano Borroni is a researcher in the History of Islamic Countries at Ca' Foscari University of Venice. He teaches in the course "Environments and Societies of the Islamicate Countries" in the Environmental Humanities master degree. Massimiliano obtained his PhD focusing on the Iranian calendar and its New Year during the Abbasid period, examining its fiscal and cultural dimensions. Following his doctoral work, he shifted his research to the conceptualizations of the environment in the premodern Arab world, particularly related to water. His work delves into thought concerning hydrology, meteorology, and the water cycle, with a focus on scholars like Thābit b. Qurra, al-Bīrūnī, and Abū al-Barakāt al-Baghdādī, as well as other authors beyond strictly scientific or philosophical texts. His current research interests include traditional irrigation techniques, the role of the sea in creation, the physical behavior of water, and years when historical sources indicate climatic anomalies with a shifting focus from the Iranian and Mesopotamian regions to the Islamic Mediterranean.

Dominik is Full Professor in Quaternary Geology, at the Department of Environmental Sciences of the University of Basel, Switzerland. As a Quaternary geologist and palaeoclimatologist, Dominik is working on a variety of climate archives, including speleothems (stalagmites, flowstones), lacustrine sediments, spring carbonates and corals from Europe, the Middle East and the Indian Ocean. One primary goal of his research is to construct precisely-dated and highly-resolved time series that provide new insights into climatic and environmental processes over a variety of geologic timescales, ranging from seasonal to glacial/interglacial cycles. It is therefore not surprising that his research interests and experience span a wide range of topics from paleoclimate, geochemistry, hydrology, biology, meteorology to archaeology and climate modelling. Because of the strong interdisciplinary nature of my research, Dominik has developed a rich network of national and international collaborations.

Isidora Freris is a Research Manager specialising in EU fund project management. She has a Ph.D. in chemistry (Monash University, Australia) and over twenty-five years of combined experience in academic research, technology transfer, grant writing, and industrial R&D. Her post-doctoral research fellowship undertaken at Ca' Foscari University (Italy) from 2007 to 2013 evolved into the creation of a co-founded technology-based start-up company in 2012, and an independently managed scientific editing company in 2015. In 2023, she returned to Ca’ Foscari University, joining the Research Unit within the Department of Humanities to support ERC grantees with post-award grant management and administration.

Dan Lawrence is Professor in the Archaeology of Southwest Asia at Durham University in the UK. He studied at UCL and Cambridge before coming to Durham for his PhD as part of the Fragile Crescent Project, supervised by Professor Tony Wilkinson. Dan has remained at Durham ever since, initially as a postdoctoral researcher on the ERC funded Persia and its Neighbours project, and then as Assistant Professor (2015-2018), Associate Professor (2018-2023) and Professor (2023 to present). Dan is a landscape archaeologist with methodological interests in GIS, remote sensing and computational approaches to the past. He is director of the Durham Archaeology Informatics Laboratory, a specialist hub for computational archaeology in the department. His research interests include climate change, urbanism, water management and inequality. He is PI of the CLaSS project, an ERC Starting Grant which investigates the relationship between the emergence of social complexity and climate change across Southwest Asia over the Holocene, and is Co-PI on several projects examining landscape change across Southwest Asia and North Africa. Dan also has interests in heritage management, and is a Co-PI on the Oxford led Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa (EAMENA) project.

Ismini Lypiridou is a PhD candidate at the Department of Environmental Sciences at the University of Basel. Understanding the complex relationship connecting climate and human activities throughout history has been proven a challenge, especially for the first millennium CE. During this period, the scarcity of high-resolution climate records has inhibited this connection, making it difficult to discern detailed climatic patterns and their impact on human societies. Having generated and worked with paleoclimate reconstruction records during her MSc degree, she will provide the necessary climatic and environmental framework in central and eastern Mediterranean covering the first millennium CE. She will achieve this by examining already published records and developing new high-resolution speleothem-based reconstructions. In addition, she will be focusing on extreme and abrupt climatic events and transitions as case studies for closer investigation of their socio-economic impacts. To do so, she will collaborate closely with the historians and archaeologists of the project and integrate their expertise in interpreting historical and archaeological data with the paleoclimate reconstructions. By combining scientific methods with historical analysis, she aims to contribute valuable insights into the complex interactions between climate dynamics and human activities. Thus, shedding light on the resilience and adaptability of past civilizations in the face of environmental challenges. 

Her work on human-environment interactions in Byzantium during the first millennium takes place at the intersection of the ecological, affective, and digital humanities. Her core expertise includes liturgical experiences, perceptions of nature (affective ecocriticism), climate emotions, ritual landscapes (including processions and pilgrimage), and the application of digital tools and methods of analysis for the study of Byzantium. In her current post at Ca’ Foscari, she explores how people in Byzantium perceived and responded to environmental change during the first millennium. She is particularly interested in approaching emotional responses to the environment from a historical and landscape perspective. Before her current post, she was part of the History Department at Durham University, where she worked as a Lecturer in Early Medieval History. She has also held research and teaching positions at Princeton University, King’s College London, Northumbria University, and Newcastle University.

Anastasia is a computational and digital archaeologist specializing in past human-environment interactions. She obtained her BA (History) and her research MA (Archaeology of North and Central Asia) at Novosibirsk State University (Novosibirsk, Russia). Anastasia completed her PhD at Leiden University (Leiden, The Netherlands) as part of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Programme, TERRANOVA. Her doctoral research focused on the earliest anthropogenic impacts on European landscapes, specifically the use of fire by Neanderthals and Mesolithic hunter-gatherers. Anastasia’s work bridges diverse spatial datasets via using techniques such as agent-based modelling, GIS and 3D modelling. In her current postdoctoral project at Durham University (Durham, UK), she is developing an agent-based model to investigate human-environment interactions in the Mediterranean during the first millennium CE. This model integrates datasets provided by members of the SSE1K project, including archaeological evidence, written historical sources, and environmental data.

Jakub Sypiański's research focuses on the intellectual and environmental history of THE early medieval Mediterranean, with particular attention to translations, patronage of science, water management and intercultural transmission of agricultural knowledge.
He obtained his doctorate from the Sorbonne University in 2024 with a dissertation titled "Les vases communicants. Les savoirs scientifiques anciens au sein des interactions entre les pays d’Islam et l’Empire romain d’Orient (640-867)" (The Communicating Vessels: Ancient Scientific Knowledge within the Interactions between the Islamic Lands and the Eastern Roman Empire (640–867), which explored scientific exchanges between the Byzantine Empire and the Caliphate between the 7th and 9th centuries. His interests include the transmission of agronomic knowledge across languages and cultures (especially Greek, Syriac, and Arabic), technical literature such as the “Geoponika”, and the intersections of law, religion, and environment in early medieval Mediterranean water management systems.
Within SSE1K, he studies textual sources on agriculture and hydraulics in Byzantine and early Islamic contexts, aiming to understand how technical knowledge was circulated, adapted, and reinterpreted in times of climatic and societal transformation.