Brown-bag seminar: A millennium of changing environment in the Godthåbsfjord

When: Thursday January 21st, 1130-1230

Where: Centre for Sami Studies, Guovssu, TEO H2.228

Abstract

Anns PhD project is an interdisciplinary study drawing on both natural and social sciences to improve our understanding of long-term climate variability in Greenland. It explores the links between variations in past and present sea ice, climate conditions, changing environments and human societies. The Godthåbsfjord region has been the most densely populated part of Greenland, both in the past and present. Climatic and environmental variations in this area are significant, resulting in different patterns of human habitation and settlement (past and present Inuit cultures, or medieval Norse farmers). In the past, links between variations in sea ice, climate, and changing environments had significance for the dynamics of human societies. Each of these cultures were dependent on the natural setting in their own specific way and therefore likely responded to climatic and environmental change in equally particular ways. Their uniqueness was their adaptation to cold winters with snow and ice, but also summers with vegetation and a diversity of animals and plants gathered and hunted. Their cultural heritage and belief systems also influenced resource use, as well as flexibility and mobility in responding to changing environmental conditions. This project aims to understand the environments in change through the eyes of the cultural landscapes, local knowledge and memory of space and together with marine geological history depositions and data, reconstruct these lived environments with changing ice patterns, resources and changing human-environment relations in the Godthåbsfjord system. It wishes to link both natural and social science together with local knowledge and  demonstrate how these different approaches and perspectives supplement each other in the understanding  of environments in change. This project also has relevance for understanding climate and environments in  change within the context of social and cultural change, changing settlement patterns and mobility,  transformations in resource use, and local concerns over the development of large-scale industries. It will  provide a detailed description of the inner fjord region, pre historic, historic and environmental,  supplemented by local knowledge from old hunters, discovering and preserving the diminishing history  together with cultural heritage of this area.

Ann Eileen Lennert is a PhD student at Greenland Institute of Natural Resources and Climate Research Center. She is staying in Tromsø as a guest researcher until June 2017. She works with environmental reconstructions by bridging different cultures of knowledge. Here reconstructions are built from marine geology, oceanography, glaciology, marine biology, cultural landscapes (settlement patterns, movements, hunting, placenames and travels), as well as local knowledge.

It is this local knowledge that Ann wishes to present at the seminar.  A unique knowledge that can both bring us back in time; presenting observations of environments in change, be used a natural scientific proxies, being used in relation to archaeology, knowledge of animal behavior, migrations, habitats, helping us reconstruct and understand environments in change, but also in relation to anthropogenic disturbances such as industry, noise and movements to understand the future of these pristine environments.