Kyle Harper

Avenir Commun Durable (2023-2024)

Collège de France

Année 2023-2024

Séminaire - Nouvelles approches de l'histoire du climat : Towards an Archaeology of Sustainability and Resilience in Southwest Asia

Dan Lawrence

Professor, Durham University

Résumé

Over the past 8,000 years, Southwest Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean have seen the rise of cities, states and empires. Climate fluctuations are generally considered to be a significant factor in these changes because in pre-industrial societies they directly relate to food production and security. In the short term, "collapse" events brought about by extreme weather changes such as droughts have been blamed for declines in population, social complexity and political systems. More broadly, the relationships between environment, settlement and surplus production drive most models for the development of urbanism and hierarchical political systems. The archaeology of this region provides us with a rich archive of information on adaptation to climate change, successes and failures which should be highly informative for current debates on sustainability and resilience. However, practitioners in the historical sciences have not been successful in translating their insights into sustainability science and policy circles. This lecture will critically review some of the ways in which climate change has been linked to social change by archaeologists working in Southwest Asia, and suggests some new ways to generate genuinely useful insights from the past for the present using archaeological data.

Dan Lawrence

Dan Lawrence is Professor in the Archaeology of Western Asia and director of the Archaeology Informatics Laboratory at Durham University in the UK. His research focuses on the relationship between climate change and complex societies in Southwest and Central Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean during the Holocene. Lawrence directs the ERC funded Climate, Landscapes, Settlement and Society (CLaSS) project, which integrates novel climate modelling techniques with archaeological data science to examine societal resilience and sustainability. He also has interests in the emergence of inequality and urbanism, and heritage management, and has directed fieldwork projects in Iran, Oman, Syria, Iraq, Georgia, and Azerbaijan.

Intervenants