Scientific Colloquium
February 15, 2023,  3:00 P.M.
Building 3, Goett Auditorium



"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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