Group items tagged

What did the Roman emperor look like? Among the thousands of surviving Roman imperial marble heads, how do we put a name to a face, or a face to a name? This lecture will take a critical look at this process: it will not only question some of our modern certainties about who is who, but it will ask what we can learn from our mistakes.

In "Climate Change and the Fall of the Roman Empire," McCormick explores what bio-molecular evidence and climate change data suggest about the impact of volcanic events on the collapse of the Roman Empire and the rise of Carolingian Europe. Drawing on ice core evidence and primary documentary research for the period 750 to 950 AD, McCormick examines the impact of volcanic events on the collapse of the Roman Empire and the rise of Carolingian Europe. Climate cooling caused by eight volcanic events, resulted in nine major winter anomalies that affected food production and human survival.