Wednesday 21 October 2015

New Indus Civilisation Archaeology Postdoc at Cambridge



 A new Cambridge University project on the Indus Civilisation has launched, building upon an earlier project known as the Land, Water and Settlement Project (with whom I've been working since 2009). This new project, 'Winter Rain, Summer Rain: Adaptation, Climate Change, Resilience and the Indus Civilisation (TwoRains)' will investigate the relationship between climate change and the Indus people.

"TwoRains is a five year research project led by Dr Cameron Petrie (Cambridge) that will investigate the resilience and sustainability of South Asia's first complex society, the Indus Civilisation (c.2500-1900 BC), which developed across a range of distinctive environmental contexts where westerly winter rainfall overlapped with the summer rainfall of the Indian Summer Monsoon (ISM). The project will combine cutting edge approaches from Archaeology, Earth Sciences and Geography to reconstruct climate, model rain patterns, and explore societal adaptations and responses to change by combining data on settlement distribution, food production and consumption, and water stress. The data will then be integrated and assessed using agent-based modelling. TwoRains will pursue a series of specific objectives through four interrelated work-packages, focussing on: climate, landscapes, water stress and life-ways, and modelling strategies of adaptation and resilience. By adopting an integrated interdisciplinary approach, TwoRains will ask "Does climate change really cause collapse?", elucidate how particular communities perceived weather and landscape changes, hypothesise why they made the decisions they did, and explore the consequences of those decisions."

The first postdoc for this project has just been announced- a two-year Cambridge PDRA working on remote sensing and GIS. The successful applicant for the position of Research Associate will conduct research within Work-package 2. Landscapes; and will specifically be involved in the use of remote sensing and satellite imaging data to carry out GIS-based image classification and spatial analysis in order to model the settled landscapes of northwest India. Applicants should have, or must be expecting to complete, a Ph.D. in Archaeology or a related field before they take up this position. Research experience in remote sensing and GIS is required. Previous experience with statistics and modelling would be beneficial.

Deadline: 9 November 2015. Start date: 1 January 2016 or as soon as possible thereafter

Further details here: http://www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/8320/

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