Cultural Loss Under Emulated Shocks – Demographic Environmental Climatic Empirical Bottlenecks

Cultural loss is a common phenomenon throughout human history, often in relation to major external shocks. Yet, there are few studies that analyse which process might govern it.

CLUES-DECEB (Cultural Loss Under Emulated Shocks Demographic Environmental Climatic Empirical Bottlenecks) homes in the resilience of culture under demographic and environmental shocks prognosed to become more frequent and severe.

By modelling and analysing drastic changes in population or in the environmental brought about by epidemics, climate change, mass-migrations, or natural hazards, CLUES pursues two key objectives: firstly, to model the cultural resilience after a given abrupt shock; secondly, to seek empirical testing of the models with archaeological case-studies.

Adopting and adapting state-of-the-art analytical techniques that have been developed over the last two decades to study the relationship between demography, enviroment and cultural loss CLUES harnesses the computational power now available to run numerical models using the archaeological and cross-cultural databases such as Human Resources Area Files.

CLUES is highly interdisciplinary, combining numerical and analytical modelling from a wide suite of fields, using tools developed to model cosmological datasets, data science, archaeological and anthropological data extraction and complex systems.

This ambitious project will study culture aiming to forecast the requirements to achieve a general measure of the shock-induced tipping-points of culture. This is highly relevant at a global and European scale.

At planetary scale, climate change and environmental degradation will bring to the tipping-point many vulnerable systems. In Europe, many rural areas and whole member states, are losing large amounts of population due to migration.

Results will shed new light on our understanding of the past, and thanks to that help our present and have influence on the preservation of cultural diversity for the future generations.