Ground-breaking: Scientific and sonic perceptions of environmental change in the African Sahel

Soils surrounding ancient settlements can hold evidence of the activities of past societies. To seek an understanding of how past societies have reacted and contributed to environmental change requires many data sources. The real-time audiovisual installation Ground-breaking problematises the presentation of such data gained through the image-analysis of soil materials. These data are used to connote environmental events and consequent human responses. Combining these data with audiovisual synthesis and environmental recordings, a basis for developing conceptualizations of new locales undergoing environmental change is presented; the visual and sonic narratives developed allowing the art-science interface to be explored

The dry tank: development and disuse of water management infrastructure in the Anuradhapura hinterland, Sri Lanka

We identify and offer new explanations of change in water management infrastructure in the semi-arid urban hinterland of Anuradhapura, Sri Lanka between ca. 400 BC and AD 1800. Field stratigraphies and micromorphological analyses demonstrate that a complex water storage infrastructure was superimposed over time on intermittently occupied and cultivated naturally wetter areas, with some attempts in drier locations. Our chronological framework, based on optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) measurement, indicates that this infrastructure commenced sometime between 400 and 200 BC, continued after Anuradhapura reached its maximum extent, and largely went into disuse between AD 1100 and 1200. While the water management infrastructure was eventually abandoned, it was succeeded by small-scale subsistence cultivation as the primary activity on the landscape. Our findings have broader resonance with current debates on the timing of introduced ‘cultural packages’ together with their social and environmental impacts, production and symbolism in construction activities, persistent stresses and high magnitude disturbances in ‘collapse’, and the notion of post ‘collapse’ landscapes associated with the management of uncertain but essential resources in semi-arid environments

The palaeoenvironment of Mývatnssveit during the Viking Age and Early Medieval Period

Until recently very little was known about the history of environmental change in Mývatnssveit, although many other parts of Iceland have been investigated in some detail since the pioneering work of Sigurður Þórarinsson in the 1940s (e.g. Þórarinsson 1944) and Þorleifur Einarsson in the 1950s (e.g. Einarsson 1957,1963). Notable multi-disciplinary research at the landscape scale, associated with archaeological excavation, has taken place and is still continuing in Reykholtsdalur in western Iceland (Buckland et al. 1992; Smith 1995; Dixon 1997) and in Eyjafjallahreppur in southern Iceland (e.g. Buckland et al. 1991; Dugmore and Buckland 1991; Mairs et al. 2006). A similar body of palaeoenvironmental evidence is now beginning to accumulate both from the site of Hofstaðir itself and from the surrounding landscape,capable of illuminating the nature of the Viking Age and early medieval site and placing it within a context of a complex and dynamic landscape