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Does Climate Really Cause Collapse? Crossing disciplinary boundaries to understand human/environment interaction in times of stability, change and crisis

The TwoRains project is pleased to announce a conference to celebrate the end of the ERC-funded TwoRains project, which has been running since 2015 and is due to finish in August 2021. You can read more about the project here.

Climate change and collapse are major topics at the top of the global agenda. There is increasing recognition that critical lessons can be learned from past instances of success or failure to deal with acute and long-term changes in environmental conditions. The TwoRains project set out to characterize human/environment interaction in times of stability, change and crisis by investigating the environmental and cultural context of the Indus Civilisation. Overall we hope to look across disciplinary boundaries to investigate diversity, change, adaptation, collapse, resilience, and sustainability.

We will consider a range of critical questions, including:

i) How do we differentiate climate variability from climate change and the relationships of the two to crisis?;

ii) Can we characterize transformation and/or collapse in a comparative sense?;

iii) How should we conceptualise resilience and sustainability archaeologically?; and

iv) What parameters dictate success or failure of societies in times of change and crisis?

Registration

The conference will be online and free for all attendees; however, registration is mandatory. To register, please click here

Registration has been extended and will close on 28th June 2021.

Programme

We had intended to host a multi-day in-person event in Cambridge, but the coronavirus pandemic has encouraged a significant rethink, and we have now decided to host an online conference that uses a seminar-series format.

We'll be hosting 7 sessions across 7 weeks in a seminar-series structure. Each session explores themes that intersect with the climatic and cultural environments of the Indus Civilisation, and how they developed and transformed in periods of stability, change and crisis. 

The sessions will be hosted as a webinar, where presenters will share their screens, and questions will be moderated by a chair to ensure a collegial environment. Each half-day session will be scheduled to start at 11:00am (UTC) to maximise engagement from collaborators and scholars in South Asia, Western Asia, Europe, and North America.

18 May 2021: Considering the 4.2ka BP event in South and Western Asia

This event is now over.

There is perhaps no topic more debated (and more relevant) than climate change, but there is no simple answer to questions about the nature of its impact on human societies. We know that humans have had a major impact upon our planet, but also that our planet undergoes natural cycles of variation that are often used to discount human impact upon climate. Both are active processes. The Holocene era in which we live has now been subdivided into stages that are demarcated by major climate change events, and it has been argued that they had a dramatic impact upon human populations across the globe. In this context, the so-called 4.2 ka BP event and its perceived impact upon the complex societies of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Indus River basin have been given considerable prominence. However, many archaeologists are not convinced that climate is a "smoking gun" explanation for major socio-economic transformations, and many argue that humans are not helpless in the face of climate change. We are important agents in our own destiny, and our history is marked by instances of both adaptation to complex environments, resilience to change in those environments, and sustainability across extended time periods.

The TwoRains project set out using an integrated interdisciplinary approach to examine the interplay and dynamics of winter and summer rainfall systems, investigate the nature of human adaptation to the ecological conditions created by those systems, and by using the case of the Indus Civilisation, has asked the question “Does climate change really cause collapse?” This seminar session will consider the palaeoclimatic and archaeological evidence for the 4.2 ka BP event as it is attested across large parts of Asia to reconsider the theoretical and practical parameters of this question, and thereby lay the critical foundations for the specialist sessions that will follow.

List of Speakers

• Cameron Petrie, University of Cambridge
• Sebastian Breitenbach, Northumbria University
• Dan Lawrence, Durham University
• Catherine Marro and Catherine Kuzucuoglu, CNRS
• Guy Middleton, Newcastle University

The full programme for this session is available here

25 May 2021: Weather, Climate and Palaeoclimate

This event is now over.

The past climate of the Indus region needs to be characterised if we are to assess how it may have impacted the Indus Civilisation. Present-day climatology shows that two distinct weather systems affect the area: the Western Disturbances in winter and the South Asian monsoon in summer. Distinguishing and quantifying the two in climate reconstructions is a challenging goal, but advances in geochemistry are allowing research to move in this direction. Climate simulations offer potential new avenues but also face issues, including proper characterisation of mid-to-late Holocene climate drivers and biases in both mean and variability of the weather systems. The papers in this session will consider the current state of the art when it comes to paleoclimate reconstructions, weather patterns and climate simulations in the Indus River Basin and beyond.

List of Speakers

• Jean-Philippe Baudouin, University of Heidelberg
• Roberta D'Agostino, Max Planck Institute for Meteorology
• Stacy Carolin, University of Cambridge
• Yama Dixit, Nanyang Technological University
• Alena Giesche, Denali National Park
• Michael Griffiths, William Paterson University
• Andrew Turner, University of Reading

The full programme for this session is available here

1 June 2021: Indus Civilisation and Ancient Technologies: transformations, continuity, and resilience

This event is now over.

The goal of this session is to present an overview of interdisciplinary and integrated studies of material culture covering various aspects, ranging from reverse engineering of production techniques, tools, and technologies, to the use and processing of raw materials. Methodological developments and new approaches will be offered, including analytical techniques of ancient materials, data processing and nuanced interpretation. 

The session will aim to address the following question: How can technological studies, such as studies of raw materials, production techniques, and operational sequences (chaîne opératoire), be used to explore mechanisms of resilience, continuity, and transformations of societies in the face of major environmental, economic, or socio-political changes?

List of Speakers

• Alessandro Ceccarelli, University of Cambridge 
• J. Mark Kenoyer, University of Wisconsin-Madison
• K. Krishnan, Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda
• Heather Miller, University of Toronto
• Massimo Vidale, University of Padova

The full programme for this session is available here

8 June 2021: Hydrological and Settlement Landscapes

This event is now over.

Human landscape dynamics are one of the most important indicators of profound societal change, including those that arise as a result of climate change. During the last years the increased availability of sources, including but not restricted to satellite imagery, new field methods in understudied regions, and computational power has opened the door to analyses of human-environment interaction that were not possible just a few years ago. In this session, we will focus on landscape data that can help us understand human responses to the 4.2k climate event. The papers that will be presented in this session will make use of geoscientific analysis, which includes GIS, remote sensing, cartographic and historical map analysis, and other spatial approaches to the study of the ancient environments and cultures of South Asia and neighbouring areas.

List of Speakers

• Hèctor A. Orengo, Catalan Institute of Classical Archaeology
• Francesc Conesa, Catalan Institute of Classical Archaeology
• Arnau Garcia-Molsosa, Catalan Institute of Classical Archaeology
• Adam Green, University of Cambridge 
• Emily Hammer, University of Pennsylvania
• S.V. Rajesh, University of Kerala 
• Louise Rayne, Newcastle University 
• Joseph Schuldenrein, Geoarcheology Research Associates

The full programme for this session is available here

15 June 2021: Indus Bioarchaeology

This event is now over.

Bioarchaeology is a growing sub-field within Indus archaeology, encompassing specialties such as archaeobotany, zooarchaeology, osteoarchaeology, residue analysis, and stable isotope analysis. These techniques are revealing new insights into human-environment relationships, allowing for more nuanced understandings of past cropping and pastoral strategies, land-use practices, human health, diet, and foodways. Within Indus archaeology, there are numerous questions to which these specialties are being applied, however, there are also challenges that face them as they develop and expand.

In this session, three themed questions have been developed to create a dialogue around the big issues and future directions in Indus bioarchaeology:

i) what is the state of our understanding of Indus agro-pastoral systems and the changing environment?

ii) Can we approach Indus food, foodways, lifeways and health and how does changing climate impact these?

iii)  How do we face the methodological challenges posed by our datasets in Indus bioarchaeology?

List of Speakers

• Jennifer Bates, University of Pennsylvania 
• Kalyan Chakraborty, Lab for Interdisciplinary Research on Archaeological Ceramics (LIRAC), McMaster University
• Sharada Channarayapatna, IIT Gandhinagar 
• Brad Chase, Albion College
• Satish Naik, Deccan College Postgraduate and Research Institute  
• Ayushi Nayak, Max Planck Institute
• Gwen Robbins Schug, University of North Carolina 
• Akshyeta Suryanarayan, CEPAM (Cultures et Environnements, Préhistoire, Antiquité, Moyen Âge), Université Nice Côte d'Azur

The full programme for this session is available here

22 June 2021: Modelling Ancient Agricultural Societies

This event is now over.

This workshop will bring together the TwoRains project's advances in modelling ancient agricultural societies and those of other ongoing or recently finished projects. Contributions will refer to the design and simulation results of multi-paradigm and holistic agent-based models used to address past agricultural systems worldwide, spanning from Old World Bronze Age (c. third millennium BC) to historical pre-industrial contexts. The workshop will aim at delimiting the common ground of participants' experiences, particularly by focusing on the shared aspects of ancient agricultural systems and their environmental, demographic, and social milieu. Under this objective, participants are encouraged to think about their case studies and models in terms relatable to other contexts.         

List of Speakers

• Andreas Angourakis, University of Cambridge
• Nicolas Bernigaud, CEREGE
• Tabitha K. Kabora, University of York 
• Timothy A. Kohler, Washington State University
• Mehdi Saqalli, GEODE 
• Sander van der Leeuw, Arizona State University
• Philip Verhagen, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
• Lynn Welton, University of Toronto

The full programme for this session is available here

29 June 2021: Climate and the Indus Civilisation

The TwoRains project has explored questions about climate change and collapse by investigating South Asia’s Indus Civilisation and the evidence for socio-economic transformation, urban decline, and the local dynamics of the ~4.2 ka event. Human and environment relationships in ancient South Asia are complex and TwoRains has suggested that processes of adaptation and flexibility produced a measure of resilience and sustainability for Indus populations. These are multifaceted research problems and TwoRains is only one project, and its findings must be considered alongside those of other projects that have been active in the Indus River Basin and the surrounding regions. This session will include presentations that consider human and environment relationships in this region and they will make it possible to critically assess the resilience and sustainability of the Indus Civilisation in the face of a diverse and variable climate context.

List of Speakers

• Cameron Petrie, University of Cambridge
• Julie Durcan, University of Oxford
• Carla Lancelotti, Universitat Pompeu Fabra Barcelona
• Marco Madella, Universitat Pompeu Fabra Barcelona
• Vasant Shinde, Deccan College Post Graduate and Research Institute
• Rita Wright, New York University

The full programme for this session is available here

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The TwoRains project is funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program.