Scientific Colloquium
February 15, 2023, 3:00 P.M.
Building 3, Goett Auditorium
MICHAEL
MCCORMICK
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
"The Worst Year: new light
on 536 CE, climate change and human history from the Science
of the Human Past at Harvard (SoHP) and the Climate Change
Institute, University of Maine"
536 started out looking good to
the still standing Roman Empire. Imperial armies from
Constantinople were rolling back the new post-Roman regimes:
Italy's African breadbasket was Roman again, wealthy Sicily and
Naples had just fallen, and a Roman army was marching north to
retake Rome from the Ostrogoths. Then the sun went out, dimmed
for 12-18 months. Five years later the first multicontinental
pandemic of bubonic plague exploded across western Afro-Eurasia,
and lasted for 200 years. From ancient chronicles and Greenland
glaciers NASA scientist Stothers (and Rampino, JGR 1983; Nature
1984) first brought serious scientific attention to this event
in 1983. Historians were slow to react but research has
accelerated since 1999, developing hypotheses about the cause of
the solar veiling: cosmic or volcanic? 2015 identified a
volcanic eruption as the cause, as Stothers suspected. 2016
identified that eruption as the trigger for a newly defined Late
Antique Little Ice Age, a persisting average summer temperature
drop of ~1.5-3.5 deg. C from 536 to ~660/690. Working with Paul
Mayewski and the novel technology developed by his Climate
Change Institute (CCI), University of Maine, and with European
partners, Harvard's Science of the Human Past has retrieved and
is analyzing the rich environmental record of an ice core from
the heart of the Roman Empire using CCI's new ultrahigh
resolution LA-ICP MS technology and uncovering traces of the
impacts in Europe (not in polar regions) of what appear to be
some of the biggest climate shifts and much new environmental
information over the last 1500 years. The talk will present what
our group has done by combining history, archaeology, and
paleoclimate science, where we hope to go, and seek to spark
ideas and good discussion.
About the Speaker:
Born on the banks of the Erie Canal, Michael McCormick received
his Ph.D. from the Universite catholique de Louvain (Belgium) in
1979. He served on the faculty of the History Department of the
Johns Hopkins University from 1979 to 1991; was Research
Associate at Dumbarton Oaks from 1979 to 1987, and has been at
Harvard since 1991, where he is the Goelet Professor of Medieval
History, chairs the Initiative for the Science of the Human Past
(SoHP) and specializes in research that brings together
scientists, humanists, faculty and students from across Harvard
and around the world; he is the U.S. Director of the Max
Planck-Harvard Research Center for the Archaeoscience of the
Ancient Mediterranean (2015-) which, with its sister program in
Archaeogenetics directed by Prof. Johannes Krause of the Max
Planck Institute (Leipzig) investigates the peopling of the
Mediterranean and ancient pathogens from ancient DNA. His
research has been supported by the John Simon Guggenheim
Foundation, the A.C.L.S., the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung,
the Gerda Henkel Stiftung, Arcadia Fund, etc. The Andrew W.
Mellon Foundation honored him with its Distinguished Achievement
Award (2002). He is a Fellow or (Corresponding) Member of
various learned academies, including the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, The
Society of Antiquaries of London, the Academie des Inscriptions
et Belles-Lettres (Paris), the Monumenta Germaniae historica
(Munich), the Academie royale de Belgique and the Deutsches
Archaeologisches Institut. His 7 books include the prize-winning
Origins of the European Economy (2002) and Charlemagne's Survey
of the Holy Land (2011); among his ~80 articles, he led the
first multi-proxy scientific and historical reconstruction of
climate under the Roman Empire (Journal of Interdisciplinary
History 43 (2012)). He has collaborated on co-authored studies
that have detected and dated the shift from the Roman gold to
the medieval silver monetary standard from a Swiss ice core
(Antiquity 92 (2018)), defined a new "Little Ice Age" in Late
Antiquity (Nature Geoscience 9 (2016)), reconstructed from
ancient DNA the genome of the 6th-century bacillus of bubonic
plague (Molecular Biology and Evolution (2016) 33 (11)),
detected the impact of extreme volcanism on the Carolingian and
Byzantine Empires (Speculum 82 (2007), 865-895), identified the
first aDNA Yersinia pestis positive Justinianic Pandemic victims
in Mediterranean France and Spain (PNAS 116 (25) (2019):
12363-72). He launched the free, student-created online Mapping
Ancient Societies (formerly Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval
Civilizations (http://darmc.harvard.edu/), is active
archaeologically in Spain, and teaches and mentors
undergraduates, graduate students, and junior colleagues. He is
a first-generation college graduate.
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