isoTROPIC Projects

Perspectives from the Global South on the Anthropocene

Archaeological, Historical and Ancestral perspectives from the Global South to navigate the Anthropocene crisis

Deep Human History in the Tropics

This project seeks to resolve the timing and nature of human adaptations to tropical forests in different parts of the world. It can be divided into four main sub-project areas, covering the time depth of our species’ interaction with these environments, with corresponding methodological approaches.

Past Human Impacts on the Tropics and Connected Earth Systems

The last 5 years of research in the tropics have not only started to demonstrate the long record of human presence emphasized above, but also the fact that human societies have left legacies of varying nature and intensity on different aspects of tropical ecosystems and their associated earth systems. This project applies varied methods to build detailed records of human interactions with different aspects of these environments across space and time.

Uniting Tropical Heritage and Future Policy

Archaeology and Palaeoecology have major roles to play in addressing contemporary threats (e.g. Morrison, 2021). These disciplines have, however, often been ignored by policy makers beyond anecdotal comparisons. In this project area, the ISOTROPIC group has identified three main avenues through which the datasets it produces can be used to provide practical, quantitative assessments of important use for contemporary challenges.

LastJourney

The interdisciplinary ERC-funded LastJourney project investigates late Pleistocene - early Holocene (LP-EH) human settlement, adaptation, and ecological impact across the varied landscapes of northwest South America in order to better understand how our species interacted with, and shaped, the continent’s rich environmental diversity.

PANTROPOCENE

The ERC-funded project PANTROPOCENE will study the degree to which combined pre-colonial and colonial impacts on tropical forests across the bounds of the former Spanish Empire, particularly across the under-studied region of the Philippine Archipelago, initiated changes to climate, geomorphology, and the atmosphere and whether such feedbacks represent the origins of a pre-industrial 'Anthropocene'.

RESILIENT: Forest Cities - Utopia and Development in the Modern Amazon

RESILIENT: Forest Cities - Utopia and Development in the Modern Amazon is a 3 year-funded project of the Gerda Henkel Foundation as part of the special Programme: Lost Cities: Perception of and living with abandoned cities in the cultures of the world. It focuses on 20th century ‘lost cities’ in the Amazon created and abandoned in association with different extractivist projects.