Open Lectures: Sediments, Soils and the Geoarchaeology of Inhabited Land

Everyone is welcome at our Open Lecture series which celebrates the diversity of our courses and passions of our colleagues at the University of Edinburgh's Centre for Open Learning.

Our Open Lectures will be delivered live online and are free to join. The link you need to join the lecture will be sent in the run up to the event.

Drawing from geoarchaeological work and perspectives from the environmental humanities, in this lecture COL Teaching Fellow Nikolaos Kourampas will explore some of the following insights.

Human societies, with their companion species, technologies, ideologies and socio-political systems, have mediated sediment deposition, soil formation, and landscape change since the emergence of our species.

This mediation has intensified dramatically in the last five centuries, as capitalism expanded from its European cradle to engulf the entire earth system in its webs of accelerating extraction, commodity production, consumption, and discard. As archives of the complex interactions that constitute the landscape, sediments and soils can offer unique insights into the history of inhabited landscapes and human ecological conditions.