It’s clear from our work in Egypt that there was climate change going on all the time, and this affected different people in different ways
- Judith Bunbury
Climate change today is considered different to climate change at any other time in Earth’s history because of its link to human activities. But large-scale changes in climate have occurred before, some gradual and some extremely rapid. Ancient civilisations experienced this, as we do, through changes in their physical environment, as Dr Judith Bunbury’s research in Egypt is revealing through her analysis of the pattern of changing landscapes. The results are providing clues to how populations adapted over the past 10,000 years.
“The wonderful thing about Egypt is that we have documentary evidence, we’ve got physical architectural remains, and we find lots of artefacts and the sediments that encapsulated them. So we can see not only the way the landscape changed, but the way people thought about it – we’re trying to read the dialogue between humans and their environment.” Drawing on her expertise in geology, Bunbury, a Geo-archaeologist in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences, works with archaeologists and historians to recreate a picture of the changing past.
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Image: Egypt
Credit: Judith Bunbury
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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