News and events

In an inaugural article of a new series of review articles in the journal Opuscula, Erika Weiberg and Martin Finné wesketch the outline of research on human-environment dynamics in past Mediterranean societies. It has been a major field of research in the Mediterranean for a long time, but has grown significantly following the increase in the number and quality of palaeoclimate and palaeoenvironmental records in the last two decades.

In a new article that concludes the Domesticated Landscapes of the Peloponnese (DoLP), we show that long-term and comparative studies are imperative if we are to identify the interlinkage between land use and climate and understand how vulnerabilities build over time and ultimately decide the societal outcomes of climate change.

A study that analyses climate variability and the spatial configuration of land use in the north-eastern Peloponnese during the Late Hellenistic and Roman (c. 150 BC–AD 300) periods. The article provides novel insight into how changing climate influenced land use, showing how drying conditions may have influenced the relocation of agricultural production.

Pollen can provide important information on vegetation changes and landscape development in the past. Anton and colleagues have extended a recently developed method for synthesizing pollen data for better correlation with regional archaeological data. The result is presented in an artcile in the Economic Journal.

Understanding the sustainability of land use systems over time requires an accounting of the diversity of land uses and their varying influences on the environment. In a new paper, published in Journal of Land Use Science, we present a standardized review of land use systems in the Peloponnese, Greece, from the Neolithic to the Roman period (~6500 BC–AD 300).

In September 2017, DoLP participants were invited to participate in a workshop organized by the Levehulme financed project Changing the Face of the Mediterranean. The result was a special issue in the Holocene, with 14 articles now being published. DoLP is represented in four of them, the first of which is out now!

In December 2016, colleagues from Stockholm University, in collaboration with DoLP, retrieved sediment cores from Lake Lerna. The first results are now available in the journal Global and Planetary Change. Congratulations to lead author Christos Katrantsiotis for a work very well done!

Read more about the resilience and persistence of ancient societies in the face of climate change, based on a case study from Late Bronze Age Peloponnese, in the just published paper in World Archaeology by Erika and Martin.

DoLP launches an updated web with information on the project - to be continously updated with news and other information!

Martin is featuring in the Greek newspaper Kathimerini - read all about it! 

Read our thoughts on the chronological intricacies of linking climate change and ancient societies. It is fun and very much rewarding to work interdisciplinary but it also takes an effort to understand the possibilities and weaknesses of the ingoing datasets.

The international conference ‘Human-Environment Dynamics in the Peloponnese and Beyond: Ideas – Methods – Results’, took place in Athens, Greece, 6-8 April, 2017. 

The recording of the conference 'Human-environment dynamics in the Peloponnese' is now available though the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA).