Áhrif loftslagsbreytinga á mannlíf í Norður Afríku. Lesið úr Haua Fteah hellinum í Líbíu

Graeme Barker flytur erindi í fyrirlestraröðinni Nýjar rannsóknir í fornleifafræði sem Félag fornleifafræðinga og námsbraut í fornleifafræði við Háskóla Íslands standa að. Fyrirlesturinn nefnist „Living with Climate Change in North African Prehistory: the 150,000-year record of the Haua Fteah cave (Cyrenaica, Libya)“ og verður fluttur á ensku. 

Fyrirlesturinn fer fram á Zoom miðvikudaginn 15. mars kl. 12-13 og er öllum opinn. Smellið hér til að fylgjast með streymi.

Um fyrirlesturinn

One of the ‘Grand Challenges’ for archaeology defined by Kintigh et al. (2014) was “How do humans perceive and react to changes in climate and the natural environment over short- and long-terms?”. A significant methodological challenge confronting archaeologists in this endeavour, though, is the frequent disjuncture in the locations of high resolution archives of climate change and of comparable records of human activity.  Over the time span of human history North Africa has witnessed extraordinary changes in climate, with humid  ‘Green Sahara’  phases at one extreme and arid desert at the other.  Recent excavations in the Haua Fteah cave on the coast of Cyrenaica in northeast Libya, famously excavated by Charles McBurney in the 1950s,  have revealed a deep record of human activity and of environmental change from almost 150,000 years ago to the late Holocene, so spanning the last interglacial/glacial cycle.  The analysis of the two records is revealing a complex story of success and failure in how humans coped with climate change over this long timescale.

Um fyrirlesarann

Graeme Barker is Disney Professor of Archaeology Emeritus at the University of Cambridge.  A principal theme of his research has been relations between people and environment and the creation of human landscapes, an interest he has pursued in a series of multi-disciplinary field projects in semi-arid (Italy), desertic (Libya, Jordan) and tropical (Sarawak, Borneo) environments.  He is currently leading new excavations of Shanidar Case in Iraqi Kurdistan, famous for a Neanderthal and Modern Human occupation sequence, and for Neanderthal burials, discovered by Professor Ralph Solecki in 1951-1960 excavations.