Transcript
00:00
Animated map showing post and pre flood UK/Europe
GVs Exterior, University of Birmingham
GVs Interior of VISTA centre
Computer animation of North Sea flooding
Guide Voice: A simple map of the British Isles as it is today – but 10,000 years ago it looked like this; before global warming raised sea levels, causing the lowland areas, connecting Britain to the rest of Europe, to flood.
Researchers at the University of Birmingham in England are studying ancient landscapes for clues on how human communities have dealt with climate change in the past.
00:25 SOT: Simon Fitch, Snr. Research Associate, Landscape Archaeology, University of Birmingham – “The landscape of the north sea was lost over a period of 5-6000 years for a variety of factors. Firstly you had the melting of the ice sheets of North America and Scandinavia which were quite considerable as well as the local British ice sheets but we also had the expansion of the ocean waters because of the heat of the rising temperatures and that caused a sea level rise of about 120 metres which took away quite a lot of the landscape of the low-lying North Sea”.
00:50
GVs Interior of VISTA centre, researchers at computers
Close of above
Over shoulder – animation on computer screen
Details from computer animation (Bodmin Moor)
Guide Voice: These scientists are studying the archaeology of climate change. Using advanced computing technology at the University’s VISTA Centre the researchers are better able to model past landscapes and more fully understand the full impact of climate change.
01:07 SOT: Dr Henry Chapman, Institute of Archaeology & Antiquity, University of Birmingham –
“The actual relevance of what we’re doing here particularly looking at environmental changes of the past, in past landscapes, by looking at those sort of long term changes, looking backwards, we can start to answer or address some of the questions of current climate change and current environmental change so we’ve almost got a picture of what’s already happened in the past which we can then apply to the future”. 01:28
Pan across VISTA Computer Lab
Simon Fitch at computer
Computer animation of North Sea
Wide - Researcher examining core samples in the laboratory
c.u - Researcher examining core sample
c.u. researcher
researcher preparing core sample for analysis
wide - Dr Gearey at microscope
c.u. microscope sample
Guide Voice: So, climate change isn’t new. In fact, the earth’s climate has always fluctuated; until recently our climate has been in a relatively stable state for a long period, but current weather conditions show that it is changing yet again. By studying similar periods in our pre-history these researchers hope to show how our ancestors dealt with and adapted to major changes in their environment. Their studies of the submerged landscape of the North Sea have relevance today since global warming will inevitably result in raised sea levels and loss of landscape, pushing populations into highland areas.
02:05 SOT: Simon Fitch – “I think we’re going to see, with the rising of sea levels, possibly a similar sort of effect where more marginal lands are going to have to be occupied, where areas that would’ve been productive and very fertile today may not be available to us so we’re going to see that pattern and migration from the areas that have been lost into the less productive and what we consider at the moment less desirable areas”.
02:27
Wide pan across Bodmin landscape
GVs Bronze Age settlement remains
Guide Voice: This is Bodmin Moor, a bleak, windswept wilderness in the South West of England, where the researchers have been examining the remains of a Bronze Age settlement.
02:40 SOT: Dr Ben Gearey, Research Fellow in Environmental Archaeology, University of Birmingham – “The moor you see today is very much the product of thousands of years of human manipulation and that begins really in the Neolithic so you’re going back nearly 5000 years maybe when human communities start clearing the woodlands to farm on this landscape. Of course what that’s also reflecting is slightly different climatic changes as well, a slightly warmer climate, it’s only really later on that the climate deteriorates and the soil deteriorates and the vegetation becomes more what we see today”.
03:13
GVs Researchers taking core samples on Bodmin Moor
c.u. core sample
Dr. Chapman mapping the area
Over shoulder of above
Wide of above – Dr Chapman exits shot
Guide Voice: Around 800 BC climatic change resulted in colder, wetter weather. In some marginal territories, such as nearby Dartmoor, settlements were quickly abandoned - but research on the adjacent Bodmin Moor shows a more adaptive response to climate change, as the community sought different ways of farming and seasonal occupation of the landscape.
03:35 SOT: Ben Gearey – “I think what we’re seeing is very much the fact that communities in the past were very adaptable and I think maybe we’ve moved from a very old fashioned view of people being very much at the whim of the environment and at the whim of these climatic changes and people scurried off and didn’t know what to do and there’s more of an idea that not only is there local variation but communities were adapting to it and building it into their everyday lives and they were responding to that change in maybe a more flexible way than we thought in the past”.
04:09
Sign for Rough Tor (pronounced “Ruttor”
Computer animation sequence of Bronze Age settlement
Guide Voice: The ability to understand how earlier communities managed their environments in difficult times could be of considerable value. How they farmed, the kind of crops they grew in poor soils and marginal landscapes.
04:21 SOT: Henry Chapman – “The research here and in the North Sea and all the work we’ve been doing just generally across different landscapes shows that people they persist they don’t just die out they don’t just give up they always adapt to things. Now sometimes that can mean quite a dramatic way and they can have conflicts and all sorts of things but generally speaking humans have always adapted and that’s why we’re such a successful species and that’s what these studies are telling us”.
04:43
c.u. Doorway remains of Bronze Age hut
Pull back from researchers walking across Bodmin Moor
Guide Voice: The archaeology tells the simple facts; that humans have adapted to extreme environmental changes in the past . Will we adapt again to meet the latest challenges of climate change?
04:56 End of Cut
Additional Material 05:00 SOT: Henry Chapman – “I think the relevance of the work we’re doing on Bodmin for climate change today is that I suppose on one level we’re looking at long time periods, we can see that the climate’s always fluctuated and people have had to adapt through time and the modern period we’ve been monitoring it for decades but it’s very short term so we need to expand that right back and that’s very useful but more than that we can look at how people have adapted to those sorts of changes for example if people were to abandon this landscape in prehistory and they moved down to the valleys well those valleys are occupied by someone else so there’s going to be a negotiation between people socially. So these sorts of questions are very pertinent nowadays, we do live in a much more complex society than in prehistory but I think some of those lessons understand the variability of adaptability of humans and I think that’s very relevant”.
05:52 SOT: Ben Gearey – “
Well obviously over the last 10,000 years or so we know the climate has been variable, most of the work that I’m involved in is looking at particularly how the vegetation changes, the vegetation can change obviously because the climate changes and the impact that people have on vegetation. Of course the trick is to tease out the human aspect of that from the natural aspects of those changes”.
06:19 GVs - Researchers on Bodmin Moor
07:00 End
