The event will be held online via Zoom. All are welcome to attend - please send an e-mail to ceh@cas.au.dk by 1 June and you will receive an invitation to the virtual meeting.

"This talk provides an overview of my recent and ongoing attempts to bring the Environmental Humanities (EH) to bear on the study of the human deep past, and to extend the scope of the EH beyond the limits of history s.s. to include the vast majority of our mobile hunter-gatherer past in unstable pre-Holocene climates and environments. I outline the Palaeoenvironmental Humanities (pEH) as an urgently needed research enterprise at the intersection of Palaeolithic archaeology, the rapidly growing palaeosciences and the EH. The pEH interrogate alternative, non-analogue human-nature intersections and chart basic conditions of material possibility on unique temporal scales with the hope to inform contemporary ecological debates. I discuss the notion of the ‘Zoocene’ as the deep-historical antithesis to the ‘Anthropocene’ and conjure a number of selected Palaeolithic case studies to highlight the deep entanglement of humans, animals and materials in earliest human history. My argument is that the Palaeolithic archaeological record is essentially a multispecies co-production and helps complementing – and if necessary countering – ‘shallow time’ readings of climate change and human-nature relations which are presently dominating EH discourses.This event is part of an emergent CEH conversation around the role of speculative literature and social fantasy, broadly conceived, in framing and addressing ecological and political challenges. Building on a first workshop in November 2019, which focused primarily on speculative literature and cinema from Northern Europe, this event will shift perspectives from the Global North to the Global South in order to foreground issues of post/colonial histories and politics in speculative approaches to contemporary ecological crises."

Shumon Hussain is Assistant Professor of Palaeolithic archaeology at the Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies at Aarhus University. He is a core member of the recently launched ERC consolidator grant project CLIOARCH, affiliated with the Centre of Environmental Humanities and the Center for Biodiversity in a Changing World (BIOCHANGE) in Aarhus as well as a member of the post-doctoral research network “Young ZiF” housed at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research at the University of Bielefeld, Germany. His research focuses on human-nature relations in the Palaeolithic, especially applications of animal studies concepts, the epistemology of the deep human past and the Pleistocene-Holocene transition. He has recently co-edited the special issue Archaeo-Ornithology: Emerging Perspectives on Past Human-Bird Relations in Environmental Archaeology: The Journal of Palaeoecology.