Michael McCormick (Harvard) “The Fall of the Roman Empire: How should we study it in the 21st century?”

Rome’s fall has excited impassioned debate for centuries, as historians and archaeologists have filled libraries with volumes on the subject. What more could possibly be learned or said? Plenty, for the last decade or so has spawned revolutionary new approaches to long familiar evidence and to totally new sources and approaches, especially thanks to the sciences: natural, life, environmental and computer.
Michael McCormick was born on the banks of the Erie Canal, earned his degrees at the University of Louvain, Belgium, and has held appointments at Dumbarton Oaks, Johns Hopkins and Harvard University, where he leads a new Initiative for the Science of the Human Past. He has authored seven books, including Eternal Victory, 500 Unknown Glosses from the Palatine Virgil, Origins of the European Economy, and Charlemagne’s Survey of the Holy Land. He codirects the excavation of a late Roman settlement in eastern France and collaborates on a number of paleoclimatic and biomolecular archaeological projects.