Neil Roberts is Professor (Emeritus) of Physical Geography at the University of Plymouth and Visiting Researcher in Archaeology at Oxford University.
His research focuses on understanding the long-term, two-way relationship between people and their environment. They include the ways that climate changes affected the emergence of farming in the eastern Mediterranean; the human transformation of European land cover during the Holocene; and interactions between climate, population and the rural economy during the transition from antiquity to medieval times.
He was an invited member of an expert committee of the National Research Council of the US National Academies, on “Surface temperature reconstructions for the past 2,000 years”, established at the request of the US Congress. From 2020 to 2024 he was editor-in-chief of the Journal of Quaternary Science (Wiley) for the UK Quaternary Research Association.
His new book Eden Transformed: An Environmental History of the Mediterranean World will be published later this year by Bloomsbury Publishers.
It explores the changing relations between the natural world and human cultures around the Mediterranean Sea since the end of the last ice age. It examines how the region’s landscapes have been transformed by the emergence and dispersal of the first farming communities, the rise of early civilisations, the Classical World, and the divided Mediterranean world that still exists today. The book explores how different elements of nature – earth, air, biota and water – have influenced, and in turn been influenced by – human agency. How did past societies cope with environmental crises such as mega-droughts and pandemics, and how did human land cover change alter the availability of resources such as soil and water? An historical perspective is critical to understanding not only how the Mediterranean world has taken on its present form, but also how it could evolve in the future. As a long-term experiment, the Mediterranean has the potential to inform wider issues of global sustainability.
This free talk is open to all but registration is essential.
Register your place
Email sei@plymouth.ac.uk for further information.