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Université de Bordeaux

8th Tipping Points Seminar: Decoding Past Environmental Crises: Insights from Archaeoentomology and Marine Sedimentary Archives

For the eighth Tipping Points Seminar, the GPR "Human Past" invites:

  • Allison Bain - Professeure titulaire à Université Laval, Québec, Canada
  • Frédérique Eynaud - Maîtresse de conférences à l’Université de Bordeaux, France

The seminar will take place on June 4, 2026 from 3:30pm to 5:30pm (Paris time).

It is open to all, no registration is required- on-line only:

Zoom link: https://u-bordeaux-fr.zoom.us/j/82385627704

Abstracts & Speakers

  • Allison Bain - Professeure titulaire à Université Laval, Québec, Canada

Archaeoentomology and the Columbian Exchange: the transformation of the North American Insect Fauna during the Colonial Period

From the 16th century onwards, landscapes of Northeastern North America were permanently transformed due to the exploitation of coastal resources such as cod and the establishment of European colonies. These colonial ventures introduced new plant and insect species that rapidly displaced local ones. The imminent entomologist Carl Lindroth posited that the study of entomological introductions was limited due to a lack of direct evidence, while the historian Alfred Crosby also examined this circulation of humans, plants and animals and framed them as part of what he termed the “Columbian Exchange”. Both Crosby and Lindroth understood these transformations but lacked access to the unique data sources provided by archaeological sediments that document the presence of Palaearctic insects from the 1600s onwards. This talk will examine the rapid and permanent transformation of the coleopteran fauna of Northeastern North America, as documented via archaeoentomological analyses.

Bibliography

Crosby, Alfred W. (1972) The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. Greenwood Press, Westport, CT.

Crosby, Alfred W. (1986) Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.

Lindroth, Carl H. (1957) The Faunal Connections Between Europe and North America. Almqvist and Wiksell, Stockholm, Sweden.

Marine sedimentary archives from the Bay of Biscay margin: key sequences to decode the Holocene climatic variability

Palaeoclimatology offers a way to supplement the limited temporal coverage of instrumental data, in order to offer a better understanding of the climate natural sensitivity (threshold periods, extremes, typical frequency, modes, etc.). This objective can be easily achieved for the western European environments by compiling Holocene series with very high time resolutions, as those existing along the inner margin of the Bay of Biscay. This work will summarize some of the latest paleoenvironmental findings and observations detected with these sequences (some of them providing a direct correlation between the dynamics of Mesolithic/Neolithic human settlements) and detail the main events consistently detected across the entire Bay of Biscay, as well as their teleconnections with climate oscillations known for the boreal hemisphere and the pan-North Atlantic.