Projects

A Historical Ice Core from the Heart of Europe

In 2013, a joint venture of the Climate Change Institute, at the University of Maine, and the Initiative for the Science of the Human Past, at Harvard University, retrieved a 73-meter (240ft) ice core from Colle Gnifetti in the Swiss Alps.  Analysis of the ice core, at the Climate Change Institute, is producing invaluable new data about climate change and human-climate interactions from the last ca. 2,000 years. Concurrently, Harvard historians are combing pre-industrial written records to create a new geo-database of climate events, which complements the scientific data. 

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Max Planck Harvard Research Center for the Archaeoscience of the Ancient Mediterranean

On February 16, 2017, Johannes Krause, Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (MPISHH, Jena, Germany) visited Harvard University to deliver two inaugural lectures for the Max Planck Harvard Research Center for the Archaeoscience of the Ancient Mediterranean (MHAAM).

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Isotopic Silk Road

The SHP’s first mini-symposium was devoted to the SoHP research project: Isotopic Silk Road. It is investigating the science, economics, and archaeology of ancient silk, in the Roman and post-Roman world.

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Mapping Past Societies

Mapping Past Societies (MAPS) makes freely available on the internet the best available materials for a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) approach to mapping and spatial analysis of the Roman and medieval worlds. MAPS allows innovative spatial and temporal analyses of all aspects of the civilizations of western Eurasia in the first 1500 years of our era, as well as the generation of original maps illustrating differing aspects of ancient and medieval civilization.

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