In this new series of four podcasts host Gill Plunkett explores the long view of climate change by interviewing the authors of Climate and Society in Ireland. We talk about hunter gatherers, disease, poetry, weather events and consider our future vulnerabilities. In today’s episode, Graeme Warren (University College Dublin) reviews evidence for the potential impact of climate change on the earliest human settlement of Ireland.
The Climate and Society in Ireland podcast goes live on Wednesday and episodes are available on SoundCloud, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Climate and Society in Ireland is also a blog series based on the book chapters. Find the full list of blogs here.
About the book
Climate and Society in Ireland is a collection of essays, commissioned by the Royal Irish Academy, that provides a multi-period, interdisciplinary perspective on one of the most important challenges currently facing humanity. Combining syntheses of existing knowledge with new insights and approaches, contributors explore the varied environmental, climatic and social changes that occurred in Ireland from early prehistory to the early 21st century. The essays in the volume engage with a diversity of pertinent themes, including the impact of climate change on the earliest human settlement of Ireland; weather-related food scarcities during medieval times that led to violence and plague outbreaks; changing representations of weather in poetry written in Ireland between 1600 and 1820; and how Ireland is now on the threshold of taking the radical steps necessary to shed its ‘climate laggard’ status and embark on the road to a post-carbon society. Purchase Climate and Society in Ireland.
About the speaker
Graeme Warren is a Professor in the School of Archaeology, University College Dublin, having been appointed in 2002 to expand the School’s practical teaching skills and provide a specialism in early prehistory. His archaeological research includes hunter-gatherers, humans in mountain landscapes, and long-term landscape histories. He is a specialist in the Archaeology of Hunter-Gatherers, with his primary research focus mainly in NW Europe. He is Vice-President of the International Society for Hunter-Gatherer Research. He leads active research projects focusing on hunter-gatherer material culture and landscapes in Ireland and Scotland, and is a collaborator on a major international project focusing on Norway and Scotland. He leads the UCD Hunter-Gatherer Research Group has an especial interest in the hunter-gatherer use of mountain landscapes, with a major research project in Scotland focusing on Mesolithic lives in the Cairngorms.
About the host
Dr Gill Plunkett is Reader in the School of Natural and Built Environment at Queen’s University Belfast. Gill is an archaeologist and palaeoecologist with a specific interest in understanding human-environment interactions in the past. As an archaeologist, Gill has worked on Irish prehistoric and Medieval sites, and has several years experience of wetland archaeology survey and recording. Her palaeoecological expertise includes palynology and plant macrofossil analysis (peatland and archaeobotanical), as well as the application of tephrochronology as both a dating and correlation method and a means of examining volcanic impacts on climate and society. While much of her research is based on Irish bogs, her tephra work extends to polar ice cores, the Caspian Sea and lakes and bogs in North America, Kamchatka and southeast Asia.
