Circumpolar Observatory

Dr Stephen Dockrill is Senior Lecturer in Archaeology, School of Archaeological and Forensic Sciences, University of Bradford. Dr Dockrill is interested in the interface between economy and social hierarchies and in new techniques of site recording and visualization. Over the last 30 years, his research has centred around the investigation of “deep-time” or multi period sites in the Northern Isles of Britain (Tofts Ness, Orkney, the South Nesting Project, Shetland, Old Scatness, Shetland, Jarlshof, Shetland). These sites have long stratigraphic sequences over a millennium or more, allowing the impacts of cultural, climatic / environmental and economic change to be studied as core themes. This has resulted in the publication of a number of excavation volumes and research papers covering many aspects of these core themes. Current research (with Dr Julie Bond) centres on the excavation of an eroding coastal site at Swandro, on the Island of Rousay as part of the Gateway to the Atlantic Project and Rousay Field School, centred on the island of Rousay, Orkney (with Drs Julie Bond, Ingrid Mainland, Ruth Maher, Jane Downes). Here a Neolithic Chambered Cairn and a secondary settlement site spanning a millennium (from the Iron Age to Norse period) are providing the opportunity to assess the impact of coastal erosion and to inform on the core themes of marginality and adaptation to environmental and climate change. The research provides an important opportunity to develop student understanding of the fragility of the coastal archaeological heritage and the impact of climate change within a field school environment. Dr Dockrill is joint holder (with Julie Bond) of the University of Bradford’s Vice Chancellor’s Teaching Excellence Award 2015 for the development of teaching methods in archaeological fieldwork.

Ben Fitzhugh is Professor of Anthropology, University of Washington. He studies human-environmental dynamics and the evolution of maritime hunter-gatherer lifeways in deep human pre/history by means of archaeological data sets. In case studies around the North Pacific, from Kodiak, Alaska to the Kuril Islands and Northern Japan, he has studied the colonization, persistence and extinction of human populations; risk exposure and technological invention; long-distance social networks; and the emergence of complex/non-egalitarian hunter-gatherers. This research engages draws inspiration from ethnohistory, historical ecology, environmental anthropology, behavioral ecology, and island biogeography. He collaborates widely with scholars across a range of disciplines from history, demography, climate, earth, ocean and biological sciences. He works closely with indigenous communities in Alaska and ran a field education program for high school students. From 2006-2012, he ran the Kuril Biocomplexity Project – an interdisciplinary survey and testing program designed to reconstruct human settlement histories and populations changes in the context of changing sociological, economic, geologic, climate and ecological histories.  In 2014, he co-founded a comparative marine ecological working group called Paleoecology of Subarctic Seas (PESAS), which brings together archaeology, history, paleoclimate, and paleoecology to investigate similarities and differences in the historical ecologies of the subarctic North Pacific and North Atlantic from the Last Glacial Maximum to recent centuries. Since 2014, he has served as Director of the Quaternary Research Center at the University of Washington (on leave for 2018, then returning), and in this role, seeks to promote interdisciplinary studies of human-environmental dynamics since the ‘dawn of humanity’.

Astrid Ogilvie is a climate historian and human ecologist. Her overarching career goal is to build bridges between the arts, humanities, and the natural sciences, in order to foster interdisciplinary cross-fertilization. Her current research interests focus primarily on climatic and socio-ecological changes in Arctic coastal communities. She is a Senior Scientist at the Stefansson Arctic Institute, a Fellow of INSTAAR at the University of Colorado and Adjunct Professor at Hunter College, the City University of New York and at Royal Roads University, Canada. Dr. Ogilvie co-leads the Nordic Centre of Excellence project Arctic Climate Predictions: Pathways to Resilient, Sustainable Societies (ARCPATH). Together with Professor Steven Hartrman of Mälardalen University, she also co-leads the international transdisciplinary research project Reflections of Change: The Natural World in Literary and Historical Sources from Iceland ca. AD 800 to 1800 (2017-2020) funded by The Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences. Other projects include: The Mývatn District of Iceland: Sustainability, Environment and Change ca. AD 1700 to 1950 (MYSEAC); Impacts of Future Sea-Ice and Snow-Cover Changes on Climate, Green Growth and Society (GREENICE); and The Foundations of Map-Making and Geography in Iceland. Dr. Ogilvie’s awards and honours include the Dorothy Parker Faculty Fellowship from the University of Colorado, Boulder awarded for “being a creative force in her field” and a Fulbright Scholarship to Iceland. Media outreach includes lectures on The Arctic Portal and ThinkUHI (University of Highlands and Islands). Dr. Ogilvie was also featured in the Nature Careers Feature Hidden in the Past on the use of historical data for climate reconstruction (Nature 549, 419-421; 2017). She is the author of some 100 scientific papers and two edited books.

Ian A. Simpson is Professor of Geography and Environmental Sciences at the University of Stirling, Scotland, UK. His research specialism is in Geoarchaeology, defined as the reading of soil and sediment stratigraphies found in archaeological and historical landscapes with the purpose of creating new narratives of relationships between societies and their environments. These stratigraphies reflect site activities and early land uses together with associated environmental contexts; they are records of the complex relationships between past societies and bio-physical processes, of landscape histories. Narratives are ‘read’ through innovative theoretical frameworks of landscape and by new techniques in soils and sediments analyses including thin section micromorphology – SEM – EDX, XRF, soil biomarkers and soils and landscape modelling. These analyses offer contributions to transdisciplinary discussion on a) Long-term sustainabilities and resiliences, b) Place, heritage and identity and are applied into c) programmes of Citizen Geosciences. Current major and long-term research programmes are focussed on creating geoarchaeology and landscape change narratives of The North Atlantic region, South Asia and the Middle East. Major themes are: Pristine space to cultural place, Hybrid landscapes; Completed experiments in northern community resilience’s; Soils and Neolithic ritual landscapes; Industrial landscape legacies. He has published over 150 research papers on geoarchaeology themes and has supervised 26 PhD students to successful completion.

Eric Paglia is a researcher at the Department of Security, Strategy and Leadership at the Swedish Defense University, with an affiliation at REXSAC – Resource Extraction and Sustainable Arctic Communities​. His research interests include environmental crisis and the history of global environmental governance; the relationship of science and geopolitics on Svalbard and the wider Arctic; and the concept of the Anthropocene in relation to environmental history and human-nature interactions. Eric Paglia’s dissertation The Northward Course of the Anthropocene: Transformation, Temporality and Telecoupling in a Time of Environmental Crisis (KTH Royal Institute of Technology 2016), as well as his ongoing postdoctoral research, encompasses these and other related topics.  ​

Philip Buckland is an associate professor of environmental archaeology at the Department of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Umeå University, Sweden. With a PhD in environmental archaeology (2007), he is director of the Environmental Archaeology Lab infrastructure for research, consultancy and methods development. His research includes long-term changes in climate and environment, human impact on the landscape, and the interpretation of archaeological sites using fossil insect remains. He continues to maintain and develop the Bugs Coleaopteran Ecology Package, a research and teaching system for palaeoecology and ecology which has been active since the mid 1980s, and received an honourable mention at the 2015 international data rescue awards in the geosciences. Phil is also active in the Scandinavian archaeological consultancy sector and maintains cross-sector links with Swedish government administrations involved in cultural heritage impacts and management. Phil is director of the Strategic Environmental Archaeology Database, a research data infrastructure for studying a broad range of aspects of past environments. The database includes data ranging from the individual counts of plant macrofossils from archaeological samples and geochemical measurements of soils, sediments and ceramics to modern ecological and climate reference data. He is also a member of the leadership council for the Neotoma Paleoecology Database and Community, and a partner in the Swedish Lifewatch Consortium for biodiversity studies. Phil is involved in the development, application and study of these and other digital infrastructures, with a particular focus on linking ecology and biodiversity research to the humanities. Phil is a Co-PI of the NSF funded DataARC, a massively interdisciplinary project developing tools to link datasets from archaeology, paleoecology, climate science, history, and literature. He teaches a number of courses in archaeological theory and methods, including GIS and supervision at undergraduate and postgraduate levels.