March 4, 2022
I wanted to share the details of Scholars at Risk Network with people today. This is an organisation that the University of Amsterdam is working with to provide support to scholars around the world who find themselves in difficult situations. The university is currently working with Scholars at Risk to see if there are additional possibilities to support people effected by the current crisis in Ukraine.
March 2, 2022
The fourth of a seminars in the Mapping Ancient African project took place on Tuesday 1 March 2022 and was given by Minchao Wu (Uppsala University). You can watch the seminar now on the Ecology of the Past YouTube channel. Seminar details can be found here.
February 28, 2022
In June there will be a “European Pollen Database in Neotoma” meeting in Prague. For full details visit the European Pollen Database web site, click here.
February 24, 2022
February 1, 2022
The next online seminar day of the Palynologishe Kring will take place on Friday 18 February.
Programma
13:00 Welcome
13:10 – 13:30 Annual General Meeting – finances, activities and board election. New Board member: Nelleke van Asch
13:30 – 14:00 Sander Houben (TNO) – Advances in Palaeozoic stratigraphy in the Netherlands
14:00 – 14:30 Marjolein van der Linden & Lucy Kubiak-Martens (BIAX) – What goes up must come down: The Neolithic human diet based on coprolites from the Swifterbant sites
14:30 – 14:45 Break
14:45 – 15:00 Announcement of Florschütz award winner 2021
15:00 – 15:30 Iris de Wolf and Thomas Giesecke (UU) – Unlocking the wealth of Dutch Pollen data: A new data portal and highlights
15:30 – 16:00 Stefan Uitdehaag (NFI) – Pollen – Silent witness to solving homicides
16:00 – 16:15 Discussion and closure
For more information on the society visit: https://www.palynologischekring.nl
January 21, 2022
New sediment coring videos from Lynne Quick and her team at Nelson Mandela University. Find out more about their work on Twitter (@The_Palaeolab) and on their Palaeoecology Lab web pages.
Nelson Mandela University’s Palaeoecology Research Group: Sediment coring fieldwork campaign to the Zuurberg Mountains, Eastern Cape, September 2021. Enjoy…
January 18, 2022
The third of a seminars in the Mapping Ancient African project took place on Monday 17 January 2022 and was given by Emmanuel Ndiema (National Museums of Kenya). You can watch the seminar now on the Ecology of the Past YouTube channel. Seminar details can be found here.
January 15, 2022
The third in Mapping Ancient Africa (MAA) online seminar series will take place on Monday 17 January at 18:00 CET (20:00 EAT). This seminar will focus on the archaeology of eastern Africa.
The seminar will be delivered via Zoom. The link for the seminar can be obtained from the MAA Slack page, or from seminar chair and chaired by MAA hub coordinator Rahab Kinyanjui.
For further information on seminars in this series visit the MAA schedule page.
January 12, 2022
The new edition (December 2021) of the International Union for Quaternary Research (INQUA) newsletter “Quaternary Perspectives” is now available for download open access. Among the many interesting reports on Quaternary science contained within it is an update on the progress made by the Mapping Ancient Africa project written by the INQUA Palaeoclimate Commission chair Prof. Tom Johnson (thanks Tom!).
Download from: Quaternary Perspectives
December 24, 2021
The festive period blog post related to the recent volume of Palaeoecology of Africa (published entirely open access online) picks out the four Perspective articles. We included Perspective articles within the volume to place the volume in context and showcase some topical ideas, with the overall objective of stimulating further debate on past environmental change in Africa.
The opening two papers of the volume are both Perspectives. Louis Scott opens the volume with a short history of the Palaeoecology of Africa series. He sketches out the rich and varied history of the publication which, commenced in 1966 as a collection of eight reports (van Zinerden Bakker 1966), includes seven conference proceedings, and has been edited at various times by Eduard Meine van Zinerden Bakker, Joey Coetzee, Klaus Heine and currently Jürgen Runge. The second article, Lézine et al., tracks the rise and revival of the “African Pollen Database” (APD) from its formation in 1996, through to its decline in 2007, and up to its re-initiation in 2019 from which this volume of PoA has sprung. Personally, I think the huge enthusiasm shown to participate in this volume and to contributing to collaborative initiatives like the APD, demonstrate the strength of the field and can only bode well for future research.
The other two Perspective papers showcase nicely some of the motivation behind the enthusiasm for palaeoecological research. Lynne Quick focuses in on the hyper-diverse Cape Floristic Region of southern Africa and what records of past vegetation and climate change can tell us to reveal these origins and assist in the conservation and management of this ecological wonder today. The final perspective, by Lindsey Gillson, rounds off the volume by thinking more broadly about how palaeoecological research can be utilised in the development of conservation policy in Africa. She focuses particularly on how these records can provide insights into drivers of change in the past (climate, fire, and herbivory) and how this can then be used to guide conservation and enrich our understanding how the landscape we see in Africa today came to be.
To find out more download all the articles for free:
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