EHL Seminar 4: Failing Strategies 1 Tuesday, October 27 Speakers: John Haldon
(History, Princeton)
Tom McGovern (Hunter College CUNY) Success and Failure in the Norse N. Atlantic: Origins, Pathway Divergence, Extinction and Survival
Eric Cline (Dept. of History, George Washington University) After 1177 BCE: Resilience, Resistance, and the Relevance of the Rebirth of Civilizations for Today’s World
Seminar series: Past answers to current
concerns: Approaches to understanding historical societal resilience
How
did environmental and climatic changes, whether sudden high impact events or
more subtle gradual changes, impact human responses in the past? How did
societal perceptions of such changes affect behavioral patterns and explanatory
rationalities in premodernity? And can a better historical understanding of
these relationships inform our response to contemporary problems of similar
nature and magnitude, such as adapting to climate change? Our initiative The Climate Change and History Research Initiative
(CCHRI) has been working on these issues for four years now, and – as our
publications show - we have made considerable progress in developing strategies
to enable palaeoscientists, archaeologists and historians to talk to one
another and resolve issues of scale. One of our main foci has been to think
about the ways in which socio- environmental asymmetries with different degrees
of socio-political complexity and population density precondition the
potentials for inherent resilience under environmental stress. By analyzing
historical societies as complex adaptive systems, we also contribute to
contemporary thinking about societal-environmental interactions in policy and
planning.
To
expand our analytical tool-kit we are pursuing the application of Collaborative
Conceptual Modeling (CCM) in combination with ‘qualitative scenario storylines’
(QSS), a technique used to translate quantitative modelling into real-world
scenarios. We want to apply both these approaches to the adaptation of
historical data about past societal responses and resilience to contemporary and
future planning and to achieve this we engage specialists from the fields of
history and archaeology as well as the field of risk assessment and future
planning.
