/ Sara Baldin
In light of papyri: ancient sources for new analysis on climate variability.
Our PhD Sara Baldin will talk at the Oxford lecture series TORCH in the Environmental Humanities Lunchtime Seminars.
By the careful inspection of archive records, local calls, and official documentation modern scholars have been able to build long and diachronic strings of (more or less unequivocally) climate driven variables – dates of vintage, crop yields, prices of wheat – thus providing new proxies series in the assessment of Medieval and Modern Europe climatic trends. The same approach to more ancient times, often wished for, would certainly be of great interest, all the more these days when the idea of a close impact and influence of the climate on the events and fates of ancient civilizations has started to be explored and gain ground.
The talk will present the potentials and pitfalls of using the papyrological record for the purpose, showing the preliminary results already achieved. So far the most consistent corpus from antiquity, papyri might indeed be the best and only way to overcome the fragmentation and scatteredness of most ancient documentation and will hopefully provide the continuity of retrievable data key to the method.