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[ silence ] >> good afternoonladies and gentlemen. my name is jill cook. i'm from the department ofprehistory in europe here at the british museum andit's my great pleasure today to introduce dr. joe flatmanwho is the senior lecturer at university college london. this is the first ina series of lectures which will be every thursdaythrough the month of june given

by our colleagues fromuniversity college. and it's a very welcomeseries too. and if you who have come in through the northentrance will be aware of the horrendous road andbuilding works going on there. and this is all part ofa much longer term plan to transform this quarterof bloomsbury into a sort of culture zone throughwhich visitors arriving at saint pancras will wander

through in a rather pleasanterenvironment than exists now and be able to appreciateall the cultural and intellectual opportunitiesthat the universities, museums and other institutions inthis area have to offer. so this is really a niceway of looking forward as well as looking back. dr. flatman's lecture todayis about the climate of fear, human responses toclimate change. and this is also a very nice way

of kicking off a jointbm-ucl lecture program because it was hans sloanewho way back at the beginning of the 18th century beganto collect the remains of elephants, and to studythem and to study accounts of elephants discoveredall across europe. at that time, the explanationfor these elephants was either that they were elephants who hadmissed a ticket for noah's ark or that they had existed ineurope before noah's flood. sloane's collection of elephantremains, his recognition

and popularization of the wordmammoth started 2 centuries of investigation of whatenvironments must have been like in the past and alsochanged the concept of the depth of archeological time. so as i say chose-- choicetoday is a very episodic one for the british museumwhere the first glimmerings that the climate hadchanged came into being and became a focus for allthose at the royal society a within sloane circle to study.

so i will hand over tojoe now, ask you first to please make sure you'veturned off your mobile phones and to say also that theselectures will be posted on the website. you need to give it aweek or so to get there. so if you want to have alook or if you miss one, you can pick them up onthe websites after that. thank you and welcometo dr. flatman. [ applause ]

>> well, thank you very muchfor that wonderful introduction. i should begin bysaying thank you. first of all, thank you to mygenerous host who introduced me and thank you inparticular to everyone here at the british museum. the institute of archaeology where i work has been workinghere in london since 1937 and ever since our foundation,we've had a really good history of working relationshipswith the british museum,

so this one of a continuationof a long running relationship and we celebrate our 75thanniversary next year, so it's particularly nice tofit this lecture into that haste of the relationshipwith the british museum. so thank you to the britishmuseum and thank you to all of you for giving up yourlunch hours to come and listen to me talking for abouthalf an hour or 35 minutes. there'll be some questions-- some room for questionsat the end if you want to.

as was mentioned, this isthe first of a series here at the british museumacross thursdays in june so come back to the others. i know i'll be comingback to the others to hear what is going on. i'm an archeologist and iwork generally on topics of climate change andthis is obviously an issue which is garnering a massiveamount of press right now. i'm one of the community ofscholars in university college

of london who workon this field now. and so what i wanna talk aboutjust a few different things. i wanna start off byjust talking a little bit about archeologicalunderstanding of climate change and how archeology isinfluenced by climate change in various different ways. i'll then move on tothe meat of my talk and i wanna give you somearcheological analogies. some real physicalanalogies from materials here

in the british museum whichi think give us an insight into past responses to climate and it feeds offthis tremendous book. now hopefully, you'reall familiar with it. it's a history of theworld in 100 objects. it comes in relationto the radio series and the website there'sthis amazing book. you can also now buy the cd's so you can listento the whole record.

and i've picked 10objects from this book which i feel are particularlyrelevant to me or made me think about climate change in humansand then i'll just round up the last few minutesjust with a little bit about how archeologymaybe gives us some ideas of the way forward. so i start off with thisslightly depressing-looking image i stole off theweb some years ago. i can't remember wherei got it from now

which i find is emblematicof issues of climate change. let's start off very,very briefly indeed with a tiny bit of the science. i am not a climate scientist. i'm at pains to emphasize that. i'm an archeologist who speaks to the dedicatedclimate scientists and i take away their dataso if anyone here wants me to give them detaileddiscussion on climate change,

i can refer you to some verydistinguished colleagues but i am not that person. but the data which we mosttrust, which is most reliable, which is most up to date is theipcc fourth assessment report. we are looking forward to newreport policy and that says that warming of the climatesystem is unequivocal. it's less than 5percent probability that this is a natural process. it's being driven byhumans in some ways.

and so these are thefairly standard numbers that we will all recognizein various different ways. world temperature isrising anywhere between 1 and a bit percentand up to 6 percent and 1 percent would beperhaps just about manageable. six percent would bereally pretty catastrophic. sea level rises overaround somewhere between 20 to 60 centimeters, morefrequent heat waves, rainfall, drought, cyclones.

now obviously, all of these isa data which is being modelled and some variation isto be expected in that. we don't quite know. we will-- we refine our dataand our models all of the time. some people also say that thesituation is from optimistic in that and some people say that it is far morenegative than that. we will have to see. so there is the basisof the archeological

or the understandingof climate change. we have various differentpictures which we're all familiar within relation to this often fed by the media and oneis this classic one of a poor old polar bearlooking like it's about to drown on its ice flow and anotherone is a more directly related to archeology and human, asense of the human impact of coastal flooding,the rise of impacts on coastal communitiesparticularly in places

like the pacificand southeast asia. moving you towardsthe archeology, i might point us getting data from various different sourcesincluding, for instance, tree ring data to look at cyclesof climate change in the past and the speeding upof climate change over the last fewhundred years ever since the industrial revolutionstarted changing the nature of our world so dramatically.

and we have here in theterritory of archeologists and you might even thinkof pictures like this. this is one of these famousimages done fairly recently for an exhibition heldat the museum of london and then more recently displayedat the national theater here in london about what climatechange might do to our world. this picture, theydid a flooded london. now you perhaps see thelondon you are familiar with, with famous and iconicbuildings.

i see in particular agigantic archeological site. london, central london in particular is oneenormous archeological site and almost everything therehas some historic value, admittedly some of themodernest buildings may not be to everyone's taste. there are archeologicalsites dating way back to the prehistoric era alongthe flooded thames there being studied by colleagues ofmine and organizations

such as the thamesdiscovery program. so this is a very, veryrich archeological site. this is what i'mtalking about then, how archeology gives usan insight into the past of climate change andhow climate change in the future mayimpact upon archeology. >> so we have a number of different waysof looking at this. we have a very negativeperspective which is this,

archeology is very oftencanary of accelerating change. archeological sitesare uniquely sensitive to environmental change. they are generally stabilized but the minute the weatherstarts fluctuating more, they tend to erode more. coastal archeological sitesin particular are an area of considerable threatand they will be one of the first ever real solidindicators of climate change

in the u.k. we are alreadywitnessing this on places like the west coast of scotland where there is anaccelerated cycle of erosion which is directlyinfluencing archeological site. so we have an irreplaceableresource already at risk in some way due to climatechange and we are anticipating that acceleratingand getting worse. the other side of this--and i called it positive but i'm sure it is positive, butthe other side of it is the fact

that climate change is one ofthese issues that we all tend to worry about but it seemsimpossibly hard to get to grips because it seems such a largescale global level problem that even governments itseems can't quite manage to organize it and individualsin particular it can seem so impossible that it tends tolead to a defeatist attitude. well archeology gives insightsinto the big picture, sure, but in particular and throughindividual objects as i am going to show you, it gives aninsight into individual peoples

and a sense of howpeople in the past, individuals in the pastdealt with climate change, so it's about humanizing it. it perhaps even gives us a modelfor future responses to change, to how we can adapt and wewill lead different lives and we will have to makesome difficult decisions but they won't necessarilybe appallingly ghastly lives. i am not someone who proselytizes adark dystopian future.

i am a terribly optimisticperson because like most archeologistsfor all of the bad i see in humans, i seeamazing good in humans. i see incredible, collaborative,cooperative organization. i see us finding solutionsand there's some work at the end i shallreference in relation to that of climatologists working inthis more positive viewpoint. so hopefully, archeology canprovide us a way towards a better understanding ofclimate change in the past

and also in the present. the fact that this also makes meterribly relevant it means good luck, i won't be fired and thatthe government will continue to support archeologyis merely a coincidental to my argument hesays, slightly rudely. now then, we had the historyof the world in 100 objects. it's a wonderful book and i wentdown and i've been listening to this show and as ilistened to this show, it increasing struckme that neil macgregor

and the other speakers hadalready been referring often to a lot of differentclimate changes you see. when i was invited to come andgive this talk, i said, "well, would you mind ifi thought a rift of these particular differentobjects i particularly like." so this is what iwanna do for some of the remaining 20 minutes, iwill have to be fairly speedy and i apologize for that. if anyone wants to talk to me atlength afterwards, i don't have

to be in an examination'smeeting till 3 o'clock so i have a littletime to talk to you. starting off wayback as far back, i think it's the firstobject of this entire book if i remember it right, isthe a clovis spear point. well, clovis spear point,so, i don't know, 15, 20 centimeters long,something like that. they are beautifully worked and archeologists getextremely excited about them.

but most members of the generalpublic probably find them a fairly dry thing indeed. as a first example of climatechange, i put it to you that this object is anexample of the amazing-- [noise], oh sorry-- adaptabilityof humans and resilience of humans and the technologicalknow-how and the image i want to give you in relation to thatis how those clovis spear points ended in the americas andthey ended up in the americas because of our colonizationof the world.

our colonization outof africa spreading out to human population overan incredibly long time span and in particular, going across what is sometimes ithink rather unfairly called the berengia land bridge, morefairly i think referred to as berengia 'cause a landbridge implies a very narrow thing . this was an amazingbig landscape, now entirely flooded-- welllargely flooded between siberia

and alaska and itgave a physical link between asia and the americas. people moved across thereand then they gradually moved down as i've shownyou in this picture. they gradually moved down intothe americas eventually ending up right down south america andthis was one of the tremendous and amazing movements of humans. there are certain aspects ofthe populating of the world which archeologists findparticularly mind blowing.

and i have to say, thepopulation movement, people right downinto america for me, every time i seethis kind of picture, i get incredibly excited'cause it's just-- it's so dramatic andit took a long time but the impact is still withus and the impact is in things like that clovis spear point. these people were living ina world quite unimaginable from the one we currentlylive in,

but they were makingthese small tools. they were dealing withliterally a brave new world which unfolded in front of them. there are communitygroups moving into that new populationgeneration after generationafter generation. and the wonderful thing iswe can track it from things like that fine clovisspear point of which there are many examplesscattered across the americas

and thankfully held in museumslike this one to this day. but we can also track itthrough exciting things like for instance dna andthis is an example taken from an article aboutthis in science and magazine a few years back. so it's a starting point, that'ssense of humans ability to adapt and it's a point i wouldkeep reinforcing to you. we're very good at adaptation. don't be afraid of change.

humans are built for change. the reason there're so manyof us is we're terribly, terribly good atdealing with change. it can just seema bit frightening, so that's a goodlesson to start with. i move on to i think what isprobably my favorite object, that may will be the favoriteobject of a lot of people, partly because it'ssuch a small. it's only about 10, 15centimeters long, such a small

and apparently unimportantlittle find. it's a tiny little piece ofart work, the book informs it and i'm sure i canabsolutely trust it that it's the oldest pieceof art held in any museum or gallery anywhere in europe. and it's dramatic. and that's one of thejoys of archeology is that these tiny little objectssometimes which people come across can be so [inaudible].

when first found, the archeologist doesn'tnecessarily know that. this was found in a rockshelter site in france. and when first discovered, i suspect the archeologistthought, "well, that's perfectly nice,"and carried on digging. and only later did theyrealize so the reverberations of their discoveryaround the world. well, this is perhaps we everso slightly stretching the truth

but i found this one veryemotive when i saw it in the book and online about ifeel it is in some ways the art of climate change and theperception of the environment like people in the past. these are swimming reindeer. this is the kindof animal these-- the people who produced thisare hunting and chasing after. the reindeer are farmore adapted in many ways to that landscape at thetime than humans were.

there's a far larger numberof the reindeer than humans. it's only later onthat we come in and we've become thedominant species at this time. so this is a piece of art workfrom people intensely in touch with heir environment,intensely aware of it, but they're still findingtime to produce art, to have a perceptionof their environment and life under pressure. and this again is something

that i think i wouldreinforce to you. one of the lessons fromarcheology is that we need to have that cultural sense ofchange in our lives, that yes, times can be difficult but wemust have a place always for art and culture and a broaderunderstanding of ourselves because that broaderunderstanding is one of the key thingswhich makes us humans, which makes us aspecial species. third one moving on, i'mdoing nice down time,

i tend to overrun on thislecture i'm afraid so, is a marvelous piece of a tabletfrom nineveh in modern day iraq, a country so often in ourminds for all of its tragedies which it has andcontinues to experience but from an archeologicalperspective is an incredible center of culture somany thousands of years and such a center of archeologicalinnovation development, it is one of the key countriesliterally for the development

of archeology as a discipline. now this is-- this-- one of these famous tabletsrecording effectively a flood narrative story, the sortof flood narrative story which almost everyculture, almost everywhere around the worldhas in some format. and various differentreligions embrace it in various different mannersbut it is a wonderful sense of universality comingfrom this.

and again much likethe previous example, it's about humans identifyingstories they can tell about change as waysto deal with change and this is partlywhat i'm doing in a way i give youcontinuity through these objects that i now give you a narrativeof explaining and understanding as do many people about howwe get used to change again and the story tellingof climate change. so we have that example,

but i give you a slightlymore recent examples. i go slightly away fromthe british museum. i want to point out anothermarvelous organization here in london and this isthe british library which is connected historicallywith the british museum now with its tremendous new buildingout of saint pancras station. >> and this an illuminatedmanuscript in the middle ages from the book called the egertangenesis on a medieval historian at heart, that was mybackground, and so this book

or this picture is onevery close to my heart. and in many ways it's exactlythe same narrative story taken forward about 1500 yearsin the middle ages of noah and the flood and thisis noah and the ark. they've landed onmount ararat and there, they're repopulating the land. it's sad-- this is notterribly good scan. the real one is so fullof color and vibrancy and it makes you glad to bealive and it makes you think,

yes, for all of thefear of climate change in various different waysand all of the uncertainty in so many ways, examples likethis remind us about humanity. remind us that, youknow, we will-- hopefully, we will workhard to find the solution. the solution will hopefullynot be lots of us crammed onto ships floating aroundthis newly flooded world. i think there may be a slightlymore complex technological fix than that.

but this is basically climatechange adaptation in action as i picture, admittedlya very colorful picture. and for those of youwho are saying, "oh, this is terribly unrealistic." it's not. the animalsare incredibly realistic, not like the unicornor something like that. but the boat-- and it'sespecially it's an ancient boat technology, the boat isa spot on description or a representation of amedieval type of boat known cog.

i have excavated boats whichtimbers that precisely that one. so these things can be terriblyaccurate in their own way. i do need to crack on now'cause i have [inaudible]. we have then thesite on number 4, a mayan maize godstatue from honduras. and now, here we haveexamples of a community who were profoundlyinfluenced by climate change. climate change hit themayan particularly badly. they were very, very dependentupon maize and after a series

of particularly badenvironmental cycles, their population wasliterally taken to the brink and the on of collapse. it is an example to us allof the need to be diverse, to be careful with whatrely upon resource wise. it also, i like to think,gives us a hint of the future and so i found this slightlysilly picture on he web, that maybe the futuredoes lie on bio fuels. it certainly lies upon weaningourselves off of resilience

on certain resources whichhydrocarbons like oil and gas are one example. maybe we will spend alittle time eating corn and we may also spend alot of time using corn and other basic fuelsin this way. moving on quite speedy, wehave another example here from rapa nui known morefamiliarly as easter island. i'm terribly sorry. i must stop doing that.

we have these famousgreat big statues, one of which is held herein the british museum. i've long wondered howon earth they managed to ship it back here and moveit around the british museum. i should ask fromthe curators that. i suspect that's one of thecommonly asked questions. but there we have a verysmall island ecosystem which was originally quitea heavily forested area and environmental change,entirely driven by humans

over really quite a short periodof time, led to deforestation. this led to dramatic socialchange and interestingly led in particular to culticactivities with the cults of the birdman as an attempt to reconcile this tremendousenvironmental change that had been broughtabout by humans on themselves on easter island. and it led that extraordinarymodern deforested landscape, for those of you who've beenlucky enough to go to rapa nui.

i've never gone there but oneof my colleagues works out there and has told me about it and itreally is an extraordinary site. so another example of questionsof how humans are responsible for their environment andhow they cope with the ideas of change, either changeexternally impacted upon them or both upon them by themselves. moving back closer tohome there, we come to one of the most famous findsof all in british museum. i suspect this is probablyone of the top 5 objects

that everyone wants tovisit in the british museum and it may be even in the top 3, the marvelous lewischessmen, beautiful example. now, a lot of people would say,"what on earth does this got to do with climate change?" well, 2 things, one it's aboutcoastal resource exploitation and people living in a veryfragile coastal ecosystem where even a period of stabilitythat costal zone, the weather and the climate thereis so dramatic a friend

of mine is working on saintkilda up in that area, not too far from there rightnow and is reporting some of the worst floods she'sever seen and keeps posting on facebook, "when is theweather going to improve? i thought it wasgoing to be summer," and she's posting pictures of tremendously heavy rainystorms and things like that. in particular though, i wantto highlight to you the fact that there are particularthreats to coastal archeology

from climate changesas i said earlier. and the west coast inscotland is a particular place. there's a project for thoseof you who are interested in this called scape to do withthe problems of coastal erosion and archeology in scotlandand they have demonstrated that there really is quiteexponentially accelerating coastal change and coastalerosion going along there and their conclusion is that almost [inaudible]question this has to do

with human-drivenclimate changes, one of the first impacts. so that isn't a distant impact in communities thousandsof miles away. it's hitting coast communitiesin the u.k. right now. most people are terriblyunfamiliar with it. unfortunately, i couldn't findany particular good pictures of poor eroding archeologicalsites. they tend to erode in onestorm cycle very quickly

so i give you insteadthis slightly stormy and slightly romantic picture from scotland ratherthan anything else. moving on, we'regetting closer in time and we have a double-headedserpent. well, this allows me torift slightly on the theme of urbanism and climate change. and here we are in thisamazing city of london with its variousdifferent historical periods

and now modern issuesadaptation to climate change and on the one hand,we have things like the thames flood barrierprotecting us hopefully from storm floods. and on the other hand, wehave new suggestions of need to adapt historicbuildings to put in things like wind turbinesall over the place. we have a point to which we're about to embrace tremendousphysical change in all

of the big urban environmentsall around the world. and it is something i think alot people are quite unaware of and unfamiliar with. i'm one of the people here tosay don't be afraid of this but be aware that inthe next 20 to 30 years, your urban environmentis going to have to change clearly moredramatically than probably at any period inthe last 200 years and this will be a good thingbut it will be a big thing.

you are going to see massive, massive adaptationsin buildings. linking into this issue andas you can see, i am tending to rift on these objectsslightly broadly at times. i think this is a veryinteresting example of past urban innovation and development 'cause obviouslythis particular material doesn't actually come from mexicocity itself-- oops, hang on. i should have a nicerpicture there.

something's gone wrong. i thought i had another picture. but we do in mexicocity have a period-- a whole series of cyclesof change reflected in the archeologicalpattern of this small and original urban center whichwas on island in the middle of [inaudible] lake site. the city slowly developedand built up and then slowly through colonization and variousdifferent other measures,

they removed almost the wholeof the lake which surrounded that original historic city and then we had subsequentmodern patterns up until the modern day ofthis enormous urban environment which is modern day mexico city. there is this sense fromexample such as this of just how dramaticchange has been. a couple of final examples, australia is a countryvery close to my heart

because it's somewhere i didsome of my early field work and i used to work out there. and when i came acrossthis object in the history of the world series, i didfind it particularly native. it's a bark shield-- it's abark shield particularly found at botany bay and it was broughtby captain james cook himself. it's one of these objectswhich has a direct connection to a very famoushistorical individual but then also providesus a connection

to an incredible population. and when i look at this, one of my big questionsis what was the lifestyle of the indigenous person whodropped or abandoned this when they saw the britishand just their true shock at being faced with theseextraordinary alien-like species which arrived with totallydifferent clothes and customs and skin and strange vessels. now, australia atthe time of arrival

by europeans waswidely populated by an incredible diversearray of indigenous peoples and unfortunately,a lot of people in modern world are unaware of the amazing environmentalresilience and adaptation of those indigenous peoples. they were living in everydifferent physical environment of australia from tremendouscold up in some of the mountains to great heat insome of the deserts,

through very wet tropical areas to very dry, moreseasonal areas. they were an incredibly adaptivecommunity living perhaps not in perfect balancewith their environment, but certainly much moreclosely to their environment and understanding subtletiesof environmental management of a sort that we are startingto re-embrace nowadays. this is also a culture whichappeals to me as an archeologist because it is a veryuniversal culture.

what i mean by thatis it sees history and it sees environmentsort of blended together. i'm overrunning so i need tochase something with this. >> but i give you apicture in particular again of just how complex was thearrival and movement of peoples, prehistoric peoples-- ohi'm sorry, indigenous people into australia tens ofthousands of years ago. we still don't really knowarcheologically exactly when the first indigenousancestors arrived in australia.

we are getting indicationsthat's at least 40 or 50,000 year ago. it may be twice aslong as that'll get. one day, fairly soon i hope,we will find a more solid date or evidence up there-- up inthe kind of the far northwest of australia but i must move on'cause i'm running out of time. very briefly, a couple ofother examples in this book, the great way a picturefrom 1830's japan, well, this is a remainder ofkind of one-off events

and unfortunately poor japan with its tsunamiearlier this year. i thought i could not put thisin to reference the stories of tremendous resilience,humanity and compassion we saw in that one example of atsunami, not a human driven one and how we will look for storieslike this again in the future as more and more humans getimpacted by climate change my final example, i'msorry to have to slip long, i always do this, isthe solar-powered lamp,

the last example, the 100thexample in this tremendous book. and what i like here is thesense of the small adaptation of humans and the waythat little objects like this will bewhat the archeologists of the future look at-- i hopethere will be archeologists in the future lookingat materials like this. i hope they willexcavate these materials this is literally thearcheology of climate adaptation as we go along and itmeans little things

like individuals havingsolar-powered lamps and hopefully like me,we've also got things like solar-powered chargersfor your mobile phones, things like that nowadaysare much more useful and we will see moreand more of this. but it reminds me too that a lot of the archeological record[inaudible] things like that, it reminds me that thefossil record will go back into things like nappies.

friends of mine work onmodern day garbage projects in archeology andtheir report that one of the best survivingmaterials anywhere is the gently decomposing disposablenappy which seems to have incredible longevity. so will it be thesesolar-powered lamps that survive or will it be hundredsof millions of gently-decaying nappies. we will get some veryinteresting archaeologic data

in the future. i really do need to roundup now and i give you that picture there of one of-- i think one of the greatclaimed heroes in terms of developing thistype of technology, the wind up radio trevor baylis. the way forward then in aliterally about 2 minutes so there's some time leftand you can all go off back to the crowd in themuseum and your jobs.

the way forward is this,change is inevitable and there will be losses. we-- even if we were to stopall climate change right now, there will be tremendous changeongoing as much as anything because even if there wasno climate change at all, we're still running outof lots of other resources like energy resources. we're gonna have tochange the world. we're gonna have to finda new energy resources

and we're gonna have to deal with that climatechange challenge. tough decisions aregonna have to be made but we are very resilientand the lesson that archeology brings youand brings to all of us is that humans are very resilient which very much wellworth doing something. do not listen tothe doomsday say. we're doomed anyway.

there's nothing we can do. the only thing we cando is have a party and then eventuallystart to all collapse. the one good examples of some ofthese books on this kind field, read tim flannery's book, hereon earth, a wonderful book. i'm gonna give you aquote from in a second which is a very positive viewof how we've adapted in the past and we'll continueon the future. tim flannery, for those who havenot read him, go and read him.

he writes beautifullyrical english and really good science, too. particular work on my fieldanthropology and climate changes and interesting and thatlittle book there, littlefield and [inaudible] usetheir stuff as an example of how we can all do thingslike have better technologies to help us do climatechange adaptation. we have lots of things going on. we are very selfish.

we're very devious, but we'reingenious and were adaptable and we're generousand we do good things. i will end very briefly witha quote from tim flannery from that book and he says,"if we take too small a view of who-- what we are, andof our world, we will fail to reach our full potential." we need a holistic understandingof how things are here on earth with its illumination ofecosystems, super-organisms and gaian itself, how we'vebuilt mutual independence--

i'm ripping there slightly. i like this sense thatwe have a possibility to change the worldfor the better. i end with one thing, that isif you want to talk about this, i'm always happyto talk about this. that's my e-mail addressand you can even follow me on the dreaded twitterif you're interested. and i would be [inaudible]not to try to do a slight flag wavingfor self-interest here.

there's a tremendousnew book coming out which is coincidentallyco-edited by myself and a very good friend ofmine, marcy rockman who works as archeologist inthe united states. marcy in particular has writtena chapter in this book all about archeology and climatechange and far more fluidly and literally than i does, goesinto the detail of this issue of archeology and climatechange in this book. the book is out later this yearand i highly recommend it ideal

for christmas presents,birthday presents and all sorts of purchasing. with that, thank you againfor all listening to me. thank you again for to thebritish museum and thank you to the lunch hour lectureseries for organizing this. it's tremendous to see you all. there we go. thank you. >> that was terrific and i'mparticularly touched that 2

of your 10 objects were[laughter] from my collection. [ laughter ] [ inaudible remark ] >> and if you want to read moreabout the swimming reindeer, you can buy a bookfor just a fiber. >> which is slightly less heavy. >> [inaudible] i'm-- findmyself staying here all the way through joe's talk hereto our resilience i think of the last glacier,maximum 20,000 years ago

when human life on-- in europewas really on the brink. for 2 millennia somehow, wemanaged to hang on to come back with a renaissance thatproduced the swimming reindeer extraordinary. but also slightly northerly, that sometimes climate changecan work to our advantage. my colleague nick ashton runs abig project up at happisbrough which through the causeof rising sea levels and coastal erosion, the erosionhas exposed what is now we now

think is the oldestevidence of human activity in northwest europe, soit does has advantages for us now archaeologists. >> and that's such atremendous outcome for site. it really is. >> absolutely. >> i mean it's revolutionizingour understanding of the early occupationof britain. it's quite incredible.

>> yes, so i'd ask you nowhaving had a little time to think if you have anyquick questions for joe. [inaudible]. [ noise ] >> yes, i just wonder ifyou could say some more about how you think london'sgonna be changing in the future? >> london is gonna bechanging in the future. >> yeah. >> in particular, we're gonnabe looking at major adaptation

of our historic buildings. one of the big lessonsis that purely in terms of energy efficiency,even if we don't deal with the climate change issue, we need to get our buildingsa lot more energy efficient. now, somewhere like london whichhas got hundreds of thousands of historic buildings,not all in anyway listed, i'm thinking the kindsof houses i live, just a very standard mid 19thcentury north london terrace,

places like that arereally going to have to see really quite bigadaptation not just in terms of say producing energy throughsay solar or wind, but also just in terms of better insulation. friends of mine who areworking at the bartlett school and then the ucl environmentinstitute are looking at this and they think it's a sayingsomething in the region of 600,000 buildings a year for the next 40 yearsbeing retrofitted

to be more energy efficient. so it's a dramatic-- i mean,street after street after street of every major urbancenter, particularly in place like britain. i mean london, birmingham,manchester, bristol, cardiff, you know, anywhere wherethere's any substantial historic building. so we're gonna have tosee major adaptation. it's gonna be veryinteresting to see.

i'm not quite sure if we'requite realizing the level of that challenge quite yet. does that answer your question? >> it's not an easy processespecially when you work as we do here in thebuilding but you will see that we are publiclyaccountable and as you go after the main gate, you willse our energy rating posted by the gate and how we areexpected to achieve better and better goals forthis year on year,

so public buildings arealready committed to this. another-- there's alady at the back there. >> i would like to disagreewith you about tim flannery who is a south australian,a countryman of mine, i think he's a piousdispose of nonsense but that's not something wecan discuss and my question is in the same direction. it's my information andi'm not an archeologist but from the people i'veread the easter island story

which is off into sortof an illustration of man's misuse ofthe environment. from what i've heard, it wasn'tdeforestation but the bringing of diseases by very earlycontact with white civilization that killed of the easterislanders not the deforestation. >> i'm ashamed to say i knowso little about easter island. this the problemwith lectures like-- >> but i'm glad you wouldn'thave use these argument then. >> i'm glad you say so becauseyou shouldn't have used this

argument this piousenvironmentalism which is being bombarded with. >> is there anotherquestion, in the middle here? >> quite a lot of questions. how much longer are we going-- >> we've got 2 minutes i think. >> yeah >> thank you. climate change obviouslyis a global problem

and as your world map migrationshowed, one of the ways in which humans have adaptedto local environmental issues in the past is to migrate. with fact that there are nowall these political boundaries in place that weren't therepreviously and the numbers of people that are on the face of the planet now areconsiderably greater than they were at thetime of the artifacts that you illustrated inyour talk with, do you think

that in fact this archeologicalindustry has anything practical to teach us in the circumstancesin which we are today? >> i think it haspractical examples-- let me-- in terms of dealing with thesheer scale of this, you know, as you very rightlysay, we are talking about our communities now whichare so many factors greater in number than they ever were. i do feel that interms of particular-- i always like the sense ofresponsibility of individuals

and that sense of archeology aswe get better and better tools to analyze is getting morefine grained understanding of individual actions andindividual responses to change-- both climate change andall sorts of change, so i like that sense that archeology can perhapsreally give us an insight into individual response. that's probably not quite theanswer you're looking for. i know we're never gonnaget enormous big picture

understanding of exactly whatwe should do in the future, but we do have a sense of-- i'ma strong believer in the sense of individual steps havinga broader role to play. i'm not sure-- your face says ihaven't answered that question but i'm trying to think ofway of answering very briefly. >> i think, too weshould make a distinction between the long-term effectsof slow natural climate change such as we saw throughthe ice ages and indeed through more recent historictimes and the effects

of global warming for whichwe are responsible and for which we can take steps. i think we've probably got time for 2 more quick one,being very generous >> okay, bob lowe fromthe ucl energy institute, if i could just pick up onthe last couple of comments. it seems to me that thebig difference between now and 11,000 years ago isthat 11,000 years ago, it was possible forhuman populations

to follow the reindeer andthat i think is the mean that i would attach tothe swimming reindeer. i think in a full world whichis essentially what we have now, it's not possible forthis to take place. i think the other thing thatwe have to recognize now, the big difference between nowand times gone by is the extent of the shared physicalinfrastructure that we have built around us tosustain life at the densities which were simply inconceivablethousands of years ago

or perhaps even hundredsof years ago. and i think that needsto be taken into account because any solution i'm quitesure will involve significant construction of communalinfrastructure, the like of whichwe've never seen. >> thank you very much. >> a good comment, andgentleman on the back there. >> yes, thank you. my question is basically onthe problem of the challenge

of climates in 21st century. my dilemma is that we'vehad all these evidence both archeologically andhistorically in terms of how we see industrialrevolution has burned fossil fuels of gas, coal and now oilover the last hundred years and is it really such a crisisor say a shock of surprise that the world and theclimate itself is responding to the devastation of humanityagainst the earth itself. >> i don't think it'sa surprise at all.

i mean if you go back to thehistory of this kind of thing, there have been peoplepretty much since in the '50s and '60s saying we'reheading towards this. i certainly can-- also i think as some climatologistshere would say that they have beenpointing out this data for a very, very long time. it's a politically senseto one that so long that we have been able tosecure cheap supplies of things

like oil and coal andgasoline and things like that in particular, it's a hard one because humans are quitenaturally selfish to want to go away from cheapsolutions to more expensive, more energy efficient solutions. my hope is that a bit--as we said earlier, sometimes being forced to change to other things willalso speed us up and it will mean we willstart to think more seriously

about yes it's gonna cost us tomove to more energy efficient and more green energy solutions,but we are going to do that. there is also-- and there wastremendous money to be made. i mean we must never forgetthat humans are so often driven by self-interest and thatself-interest can be harnessed to do good thingsto climate change. i know not necessarilybe entirely negative. i hope that answeredyour question. i'm aware we're on deadone and i'm gonna get shut

out of the british museum. >> oh, well. [laughter] i'm reluctantwhen there is such interest to draw a close and people mustleave-- please feel free to so, but we'll allow one morequestion and then i must close. >> okay thanks. given that-- the rate ofclimate change is now fast than it has been everbefore in human history, apart from a messageof metaphorical

and motivational message of hopeand resilience and adaptability and what would yousay to those who said that archeology is now lessrelevant than most the fields when it comes to this issue. >> i would disagreeprofoundly this. i think it's more andmore and more relevant. one of the simple factors is that continually realizewe know less and less about the human pastworld than more

and more about the human past. happisbrough is fineexample of that, that climate change hasinadvertently revealed an archaeological site whichis absolutely influential to our understanding of the first peoplingof the british isles. i work all over britainand i'm continually amazed by the things we find. so on the one hand, it'simmediately influential

to local communitieswho do care. there's also the factthat archaeological sites as i've said will be some of thesites which first get damaged by climate change andcommunities really, really care about theheritage a lot more than perhaps peoplenecessarily realize. the other thing to rememberis that archeology is one of [inaudible] thedifferent scientists and archeology neverexist in a vacuum.

this british museum is anabsolute example that archeology and its aim is merely one of about hundred differentinterrelated disciplines. so we feed in to theclimate scientists who feed into the ecologists andfeed into and feed into and feed into and feed into. so we are one little part ofwhere the scientific ecosystem which helps provide variousdifferent understanding as well. >> i think with that,

i must thank dr. flatmanfor a tour de force. the relevance of archeology to these questions i thinkis evident from a discussion which is beginning to emergewhich i think could probably go on all afternoon andrange from demographics to the potential causesof population change in other parts of the world. it's been absolutely marvelous. i hope you'll come back.

if you want to see theobjects shown in the talk and indeed the others of hundredobjects, you can pick up leaflet at the information deskand go around and all of the objects are signedup in the various galleries. i hope you'll have an enjoyableafternoon and that we'll see you for the next lecturesin this series. thank you very much indeed. bye-bye.