Coping with Changing Climates in Early Antiquity

1155 East 58th Street,Chicago IL 60637

04 December, 2021

Description

Conference: Coping with Changing Climates in Early Antiquity December 4, 2021, 8:30 am–5:30 pm: Oriental Institute, Breasted Hall December 5, 2021, 8:30 am–12:30 pm: Franke Institute for the Humanities This event is in-person attendance only. Masks are required in all University of Chicago buildings. Echoing the rising concerns about global anthropogenic climate change, many recent scholarly publications, media articles, and popular books have put forth a narrative of historical processes in which climate change appears as the prime mover for the rise and fall of societies throughout world history. Driven by empirical studies of past climate systems in the natural sciences using paleoclimatic archives, these narratives often reduce ancient societies to the status of passive victims of external natural forces, with little to no attention paid to their agency in coping with changes in their environments, nor to their material choices, intellectual perspectives, and cultural ideas of their surroundings. This conference aims at offering a different and more holistic perspective on past human-environment relationships, one that integrates humanistic and social scientific approaches to studying climatic and social change with available scientific evidence. The speakers examine these interrelationships through textual, archaeological, and environmental data in a region that ranges from Nubia in the south to Anatolia in the north, and from Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean in the west to Mesopotamia in the east, during the third to early first millennia BCE. These comparative angles highlight the complexities of analyzing how ancient social groups encountered and coped with changing climates. The conference will showcase the results of a three-year collaboration between the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, and Purdue University, sponsored by the Humanities Without Walls consortium, as well as a selection of lectures by guest speakers to frame and complement the work of the project members. In addition, a poster session will showcase research by students from the participating institutions.