Human society is intimately linked to the environment that sustains it. Civilizations have evolved during the period of unique climatic stability that has prevailed since the onset of the Holocene, around 10 ka. However, even within this overall framework of stability, changes in regional and global climate have significantly impacted the development of societies.

To understand the effects of climate change, population increase, and resource exploitation on modern societies, a better understanding of how climate, landscapes and civilizations have interacted in the past is needed.

Although these processes impact most strongly poorer, less prepared countries, catastrophic events, such as Hurricane Katrina, have shown that even the wealthiest countries are not immune to the effects of environmental catastrophe.

<>
This Chapman meeting will assess the present state of science concerning how mankind and the environment have interacted over a variety of time and spatial scales. We encourage participation of scientists from across the fields of the ocean and Earth sciences, as well as anthropology, archaeology and the historical sciences. Although the meeting will feature keynote speakers and established researchers, we particularly wish to involve early career workers and Ph.D. students. Sponsorship is available to graduate students who are members of the International Association of Sedimentologists (IAS).

The meeting will span five days, with the afternoon of the fourth day being reserved for a field trip to Native American Pueblas in the Santa Fe region. The schedule is designed to start with an overview of general, global climate change processes, especially focused on the Holocene, followed by a series of dedicated sessions on a number of geographic areas where early human societies have evolved and where interactions with the evolving environment appear to have been important to their success or subsequent collapse. In particular we highlight:

1) Africa
2) Nile
3) South Asia
4) Mediterranean
5) Black Sea
6) Central Europe

7)   North Atlantic
8)   North America
9)   Central America
10) South America
11) Australia
12) East Asia

The meeting will conclude with a synthesis session in which more general patterns of human-environmental interactions will be outlined. The meeting will further discuss what issues are now most pressing and should be targetted for future research work.

> download conference poster

We plan a conference field trip on the fourth day of the meeting to allow participants a mental break from the focus sessions and the opportunity to see some of the spectacular geology and scenery of New Mexico, as well as some of the famous Puebla sites of the indigenous peoples.

This meeting is designed for input from geologists, climatologists, geomorphologists, archaeologists and paleoceanographers.