Paper short abstract:

This paper arises from a transdisciplinary collaboration at the University of Cologne in which archeologists, climatologists, cultural historians and computer scientists are working together to map the interrelationship between climate change and cultural change from the deep past to the present.

Paper long abstract:

This paper arises from a transdisciplinary collaboration at the University of Cologne in which archeologists, climatologists, cultural historians, environmental linguists, ecocritics, and computer scientists are working together to map, model and better understand the interrelationship between climate change and cultural change from the deep past to the present. The overall project aims to develop a new field of Human and Earth System Coupled Research (HESCOR) in order to identify those cultural factors that have either enabled or impeded successful adaptations to past climatic changes with a view to deriving actionable knowledge in the face of today’s unprecedented anthropogenic climate disruption. Here, we discuss the methodological challenges of such an undertaking, and share some initial insights from our subproject on how human societies have variously perceived and conceptualized ‘nature’ through time, exploring how historically-specific cultural assumptions, values, meanings and purposes regarding the more-than-human world mediated and shaped human responses to past climatic and associated environmental changes in specific times and places of major transition (‘climes’), and how those changes in turn reshaped prevailing knowledges, imaginaries and practices of more-than-human world-making. Situated within the environmental humanities, our research draws on multispecies and decolonial approaches in order to open both new perspectives on the past and pathways towards transformational resilience in the perilous present.