Photo: H.P. Blankholm 2016
Welcome to the Joint Proxies Research group
The “Joint research on human and natural adaptation to changing climates and environments in the High North (Joint Proxies)” research group is an international, interdisciplinary group, established at UiT The Arctic University of Norway in 2015, and funded by the Faculty for the Humanities, Social Sciences and Education and the Research Council of Norway.
A joint proxy is an archaeological site with good preservation conditions that contains proxy data of relevance for archaeological, geological, botanical, zoological and climate change research and interpretation.
The High North encompasses the Arctic and Subarctic parts of Scandinavia, Greenland, USA, Canada and Russia.
By analyzing joint proxies, where our respective sources and data converge in time-capsules, the research network aims to deliver an important and substantial interdisciplinary and international contribution to regional and global knowledge on how both human and natural populations (animals and plants) have adapted to global climate change in the High North through time. Concurrently, and by using the same baseline data, our aim is to make a significant contribution to climate research, particularly regarding temperature oscillations on various time-scales through the past 10,000 years. This in turn will provide a basis for more precise predictions regarding the adaptation of human and natural populations to future climate change. Our current focus is on isotope and element analyses of prehistoric foodways and climate change.
The research group is led by Professor H. P. Blankholm, Department of Archaeology, History, Religious Studies and Theology, UiT The Arctic University of Norway. Currently the group counts 15 members (see Members page), coming from Norway (UiT The Arctic University of and University of Stavanger), Sweden (University of Stockholm), Denmark (National Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen), England (University of Durham), Scotland (University of Edinburgh), and Canada (Arctic Institute of North America, Calgary) and covering a wide range of disciplines such as archaeology and prehistory, zooarchaeology, archaeological science, marine and terrestrial geology, climate research, paleoentomology, and botany.
