Climate Change, Food Production, and Societal Collapse: Considering Sustainability within Ancient Mesopotamia

Alexia Smith
Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology
University of Connecticut

April 16, 2014
317 Silsby Hall
3:00 - 4:30 PM

Archaeology provides an ideal tool for examining the long-term dynamic relationship between people and their environment. This talk presents how archaeologists reconstruct ancient methods of food production and climate change, providing examples from sites in Northern Mesopotamia. Lessons learned from studies of ancient agriculture are applied and used to consider issues of sustainability and the role that climate change played in collapse of the Akkadian Empire at the end of the 3rd Millennium B.C.

Co-sponsored by the Dickey Center for International Understanding

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