ENV 766b () / 2025-2026

Genesis and Collapse: Environmental Archaeology of West Asia, Egypt, the Aegean and Indus.

Credits: 3 Spring 2026: Th, 3:30-5:20, TBA

The archaeological and historical records of ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Aegean, the Indus, East Asia, are now complemented with unprecedented Holocene paleoclimate records for abrupt, high magnitude, century- scale climate changes, including megadrought. These climate changes were coincident with the major genesis and collapse transformations that shaped or determined the earliest civilizations, and with causal linkages previously unimagined that are now to be charted and measured in this seminar.