Research

Massimiliano Borroni, Helen Foxhall Forbes, Vicky Manolopoulou and Jakub Sypiański focus on written sources from across the Mediterranean region relating to intellectual and social responses to climatic/environmental change in the first millennium. They integrate evidence from textual sources with palaeoenvironmental and archaeological data in order to address key research questions such as: how did people experience and understand environmental change in this period? how did people respond (e.g. socially, politically, intellectually or emotionally) to significant climatic fluctuations? how much did agricultural practices relate to contemporary environmental or climatic change and how were new cultural influences integrated and adapted in different areas of the Mediterranean as people moved around and transmitted new ideas?

The team aims to compare textual evidence across cultures and chronologies as well as to integrate evidence from different disciplines to understand the complexity and nuances of the ways that contemporary individuals, communities and societies responded to environmental change.

Dan Lawrence, Michele Abballe and Olga Palacios specialise in landscape, digital, and environmental archaeology.

Dan Lawrence and Michele Abballe are responsible for collecting archaeological data to reconstruct population dynamics and settlement strategies in the long term. They are producing a large dataset to enable analysis of human-environment interactions, focusing initially on Italy but expanding to cover other areas of the Western Mediterranean, using GIS and remote sensing as well as other computational approaches, and integrating relevant textual data where appropriate.

Olga Palacios specialises in archaeological data science and is undertaking agent-based modelling (ABM) of social-ecological systems. The model is informed by textual and archaeological evidence: written sources inform the assumptions in the ABM, while archaeological data serves as a baseline for the settlements modelled.

Dominik Fleitmann and Ismini Lipiridou focus on environmental proxies, particularly speleothems, in a number of sites which are relevant for understanding environmental and climatic conditions in various parts of the Mediterranean basin.

In addition to reviewing scholarship relating to established environmental and climatic fluctuations in this period, they are developing new high-resolution speleothem-based hydroclimatic reconstructions from key sites in the Mediterranean region.

They work with other team members to integrate data drawn from textual and archaeological evidence into their analysis of the palaeoenvironmental records, which enables the team to address questions relating to the impact on human experience and contemporary societies of the climatic and environmental fluctuations visible in the environmental proxies.