Authors

Johanna Hilpert^1*, Jana Anvari¹, Shumon T. Hussain^1,2, Götz Ossendorf¹, Silviane Scharl¹, Isabell Schmidt¹, and Andreas Maier¹

¹ Department of Prehistoric Archaeology, University of Cologne
² MESH – Center for Multidisciplinary Environmental Studies in the Humanities, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Cologne

* Johanna.Hilpert@uni‐koeln.de

Abstract

HESCOR (Human and Earth System Coupled Research) is a collaborative research project recently established at the University of Cologne. It provides a cross-faculty and multi-disciplinary structure to investigate how constellations and interactions of the human and Earth systems influenced cultural evolution during the main phases of past human expansion. In particular, it aims at bridging the boundaries between the humanities and the natural sciences to make the data generated in both fields mutually fruitful. Expertise is brought together by a team of 22 Postdocs and Principal Investigators from climate and Earth-system science, computational science and machine learning, archaeology, linguistics, and the environmental humanities.

Scientists have long been interested in how climate and other environmental factors influenced human dispersal, but the effort to study the archaeology of climate change was bottlenecked by a lack of knowledge on dynamic human processes and the capacity for quantifying climate-human relations. Within HESCOR, it is planned to model human population and dispersal as a manifestation of the interactions of human and Earth system components, both characterised by a large degree of freedom, a range of non-linear processes on different scales, and external forcings which are unsteady or stochastic.

Besides a systematic review on how human culture affects large-scale transformation processes that accompany environmental changes, HESCOR will investigate spatiotemporally defined case studies ranging from the Palaeolithic to the Neolithic period. The project, funded by the “Profile Building 2022” initiative of North Rhine-Westphalia’s Ministry for Culture and Science, also intends to lay the foundation for future research and teaching initiatives on engaging with past, present and future cultural evolution from the perspective of complex system interactions at the University of Cologne.

This poster gives an overview of the project’s structure and objectives to reach out to interested colleagues and offer topics for collaboration.