Yale University & the Peabody Museum of Natural History

October 26-27, 2023

Our team convened on Yale’s campus to celebrate the culmination of four year’s worth of hard work and to discuss next steps for the team. It was exciting to see everyone in person at long last—we had all had enough of the monthly team meetings on ZOOM. Many of us noted how remarkably productive we are together. Ideas flew across the table, as did good questions, for two full days.

We began the first day with brief presentations by Ram Singh, our (nor former, sadly!) post-doc at Columbia/NASA-GISS discussing, and hopefully trying to improve, the climate model and its implications for our major synthetic paper. Zan Stine and Aleyda Trevino of SFSU discussed their insights concerning solar forcing and the East African Monsoon, something that we hope to incorporate into our analysis along the side of short-term volcanic forcing of the EAM.

Selga Medeneiks, Trinity College Dublin, next presented her work on the influence of drought on the Maccabean revolt in the middle of the second century BCE.

After lunch most of us had a private tour of the beautiful new galleries of the Peabody Museum.

Jenn Marlon presented ideas and plans for an exhibit at the Peabody, in a beautiful new hall, once the Museum opens in the late Spring 2024. We all are very much looking forward to seeing the exhibit in place. It will represent the culmination of much hard work over the last six years by us all.

We also had a productive brainstorming session about the state of the project work and publication plans.

A wonderful dinner in the private dining room of Restaurant Zinc in New Haven ended the first day we were thrilled to host Professor David Skelly, Director of the Peabody, where we discussed the details of the exhibit.

The next morning, we continued our group conversations with some invited friends of the project. We have applied (and recently been granted) an no cost extension for the project until Summer 2024. This will allow us to wrap up some valuable work, to fund one final meeting planned for Dublin in April 2024 and of course to fund the Peabody Museum exhibit. We also noted that many of the team plan to be in Bern in June 2024 for a major conference that has been planned on Climate and History during the Holocene.