Event time:
Monday, April 14, 2025 - 12:00pm
Location:
HQ 213
Event description:
The ARCHAIA Forum is delighted to be hosting a research talk/workshop with Dr Selga Medenieks, Associate Research Scholar with the MacMillan Center and Research Fellow at Trinity College, Dublin entitled ‘Climate Science & the Historian - a ‘How To…”. She has been working with our very own Joe Manning on the project ‘Volcanism, hydrology and social conflict: lessons from Hellenistic and Roman-era Egypt and Mesopotamia’ and will be sharing insights into the ways historians working on various periods can use the exciting new climate data for their research questions. In her own words:
One of the principal methodological aims of recent Humanities scholarship is to situate events in their environmental context, in order to obtain a fuller understanding and more authentic account of the past. This ambition in ancient historical studies has until recent years been hindered by various difficulties but particularly poor detail and lacunae in our primary sources (written accounts and natural proxies for environmental conditions, like tree-rings and speleothems). More lately, however, advances in climate science have opened a way to bridge these gaps. Breakthroughs in the analysis and dating of atmospheric records derived from polar ice cores now enable highly sensitive modelling that accurately reconstructs bygone environmental conditions – such as temperature, rainfall, air circulation, flooding – almost anywhere and for any given year of the past two millennia.
Selected case studies from the ancient Near East – in Egypt, Judea, and Babylonia – at a time of volcanically-forced climate upheaval, the 160s BCE, will demonstrate the potential of this remarkable new, independent resource to shed light on important but previously opaque episodes in the historical record. The discussion will illustrate how historians can incorporate climate science in their work to take a more holistic view of events in the ancient world.
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Please join us on Monday April 14th at 12 noon in HQ 213!
Lunch will provided for attendees - please sign up here to give us an idea of numbers! (Link to Google Form)